He did not doubt the continued life of the soul after death, but precisely because he was sure that the gates of paradise would remain closed to him throughout eternity he would not help to open them for the dead child.  When his imagination tortured him with fancies that mice and beetles were leaping and running out of his pockets and the breast of his doublet, he thought that his end was drawing near.  If the devil then had power over his soul, his imps might drag him wherever they pleased, if only he might see little Juli there and hear her call “Baba” and “Father.”  It would lessen the tortures of hell, however severe they might be.  Was it possible for him to conceive of any greater folly than to rob himself of this consolation by transporting the child, through the indulgence, to the kingdom of heaven, where he could never see her again.  He had accumulated a goodly sum by begging, it is true, but, strangely enough, he did not think of purchasing salvation for himself in order to meet his child again in heaven, instead of amid the flames of purgatory.  Though he had become as rich as the Fuggers, paradise, he knew, would still be closed to him.  He was not fit for it.

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.