Yesterday, for the first time, he had seriously threatened to drive the ropedancer away, and she knew that Cyriax was capable of anything.  True, his wife was attached to Kuni, but she had little influence over her vicious husband.  So the sick cripple might only too easily find herself left on the highway.

Still, she had given Cyriax cause for the threat.  All day and during the night she had been busy with the unfortunate mother and her twins, and therefore had frequently neglected to fill his brandy bottle.  But this could not be helped, and she was not accustomed to think of the future.  Whatever her heart urged she did, no matter what might happen.  If Cyriax left her in the lurch, she must beg or starve unless chance, which so often mingled in her existence, willed otherwise.

With the child’s life the modest happiness which Kuni had enjoyed during the last few months had vanished, not only because the tongueless blasphemer had become a different person, and she sorely missed the delicate little creature who had filled and cheered her heart, but she had also lost the peace of mind which she enjoyed during the existence of her charge.

The young Augsburg maiden, whom she thought she had bought out of the flames of purgatory, did not appear to her again, but the vagrant’s child came all the more frequently, and whenever she showed herself she wailed and wept bitterly.  Sweet little Juli’s soul must now—­whether it had been Juliane’s or not—­endure the tortures of purgatory, and this pierced Kuni’s heart the more deeply the more affectionately she remembered the sickly-child.

Ever since she had used a black plaster, given to her at Singen by a quack, the stump of her foot had become sore again, and sharp pain tortured her so cruelly that, especially when the cough racked her emaciated body and she was jolted to and fro in the springless cart over stony roads, she was afraid that she should lose her reason.

At Pforzheim a barber had examined the wound and, shaking his head, pronounced the black plaster a malignant blood poisoner, and when she refused to have the leg amputated, applied a yellow one, which proved no better.  When Cyriax counted up his receipts in the evening, called to red-haired Gitta his favourite maxim, “Fools never die,” and handed to her—­Kuni—­the larger brandy bottle to fill, she had often summoned up her courage and begged him to buy an indulgence for his sweet little Juli.  The result was certain—­she knew it from her own experience.

Shortly after the child’s death he had thrust his hand into his purse more than once at such an appeal and given money for a few candles, but it had not been possible to persuade him to purchase the paper.

This refusal was by no means due to mere parsimony.  Kuni knew what induced him to maintain his resistance so obstinately, for in her presence he had told pock-marked Ratz that he would not take the indulgence gratis.  Wherever he might be, his family ought to go, and he did not wish to be anywhere that he would not find Juli.