Most of them were already asleep on heaps of straw, which were raised at the head by chairs turned upside down.  The richer guests had gone to the bedrooms, which, however, they were obliged to share with several others.  Some of the strollers were lying on the floor with their knapsacks under their heads.  A few of the musicians were still lingering over the wine which the travelling merchants and artisans had ordered for them.  Others had gone with some of the vagrants into the little wood beyond the meadow, where they danced, fiddled, and sang.

Their loud shouts were borne by the cool night breeze to the sufferer in the cart.  The gentlemen from Cologne, without troubling themselves about the boisterous merriment of the burghers or the transformation of the room into a sleeping apartment, were still sitting at the table talking together eagerly.

The dealer in the indulgences, too, had not yet gone to rest.  A tall, broad-shouldered sergeant belonging to the escort had just purchased—­ for the larger part of the zecchins won as his share of the booty in the Italian war—­the indulgence which he thought would secure him from the tortures of the fire of purgatory.  Before opening the door, he struck his broad breast as though relieved of a heavy burden.

The ropedancer looked after him thoughtfully.  The paper had now lightened the sergeant’s heart as it had formerly done her own.  Would she not have been wiser to give her money for the redemption of Nickel’s lost soul than for the orphans, whom the charity of the people would perhaps have succoured without her?  Probably, too, it would have afforded still greater consolation to the poor dying woman, whom nothing troubled so sorely as her guilt for the doom of her unfortunate husband.

Yet, even thus she had succeeded in making the dying mother’s departure easier, and what she had commenced she intended to complete at once.

With a tender smile that lent strange beauty to her pallid, grief-worn face she continued her survey.

She had previously noticed an old priest, whose countenance bore the impress of genuine kindness of heart.  She soon found him again among the travellers sleeping on the straw; but the old man’s slumber was so sound that she felt reluctant to wake him.  Among the Dominicans from Cologne, most of whom were also asleep, there were none she would have trusted, nay, she even thought that one was the very person who, shortly before her fall from the rope, had pursued her with persistent importunity.  But the Abbot of St. AEgidius in Nuremberg, who had dined with the ambassadors from his native city, was also a man of benevolent, winning expression.  His cheeks were flushed, either by the heat or the wine which he had drunk, but there was a look of attractive kindness upon his well-formed features.  When he went through the room a short time before, Kuni had seen him pass his hand caressingly over the fair hair of the pretty little son of a potter’s wife from Reren on the Rhine, whose cart was standing outside in the meadow by the Main.  He was scarcely of the same mind as the gentleman from Cologne, for he had just waved his plump hand in protest.