He hated everybody who was rich and respectable.  He would rather be with his child in the mire of hell than to go with her to a magnificent garden of paradise where swearing was forbidden, where there was no brandy and no highroad, and which offered only pleasures which were none to him.

So Kuni was forced to see the child remain in the fires of purgatory, which hurt her little less than her aching limb.

At her entrance into The Blue Pike pain and mental suffering had driven her to the verge of despair.  But the day which began so sorrowfully was followed by an evening of delight—­she owed to it her new meeting with Lienhard.

From childhood she had been homeless, and every quarter of the globe to which a highroad led was her native land.  Yet in Spain and during the journey back she had felt a gnawing longing for Germany, nay, nothing had troubled her more than the thought of dying and being buried outside of its frontier.  Her mother, a native of the Rhine country, had given her birth during the fair at Cologne on the Spree; but, whenever homesickness assailed her, it was always the steeples of St. Sebald and St. Ulrich which beckoned to her, and she had longed for the Frank country, the Main, or the richly wooded banks of the Pegnitz.  Was this because, in Nuremberg, for the only time in her life, she had been a member of a decorous household, or had the love which, wherever Cyriax’s cart and donkey carried her, always drew her heart back to the same ancient city, made it so dear to her?

Probably the latter, for yesterday she had yearned ardently to reach Nuremberg; but since she had seen Lienhard again, she rejoiced that she was in Miltenberg and at The Blue Pike.

Never had he seemed to her so handsome, so manly.  Besides, he had spoken to her, listened to her reply, and even given her money with lavish generosity.  It was like him!  No one else would have been capable of it.

She could live a long time on his three gold florins, if Cyriax abandoned her; yet the unexpected wealth burned in her hand and perplexed her.  Did Lienhard no longer know that she would not accept money from him?  Had she robbed herself of the certainty that beautified existence; had she failed to show him her superiority to other vagrant girls?  Yet no!  What he gave her was more, far more, than even a prince bestowed upon an ordinary mendicant.  He must measure her by a special standard.  If he had only given her the gold with a kind word, not flung it silently into her lap.  This half destroyed her pleasure in the present, and the ample supply of money clouded her already disturbed peace of mind still more.  Had it been possible, she would have returned the gift as she did the alms at Augsburg.  But how was this to be accomplished in the over-crowded inn?

Yet, if she kept the florins, the sacrifice at the convent would lose a large portion of its value, and the good opinion which her act at Augsburg must have inspired might be shadowed.