Cyriax was one of the first who followed the road.  He had sold his cart and donkey, and wanted to burden his red-haired wife with his possessions, but as she resolutely refused he had taken the bundle on his own lazy shoulders.  Now he dragged himself and his new load onward, swearing vehemently, for Ratz had remained with the cart in Miltenberg, where the sham lunatic no longer found it safe to stay.  This time it was he who was obliged to pull his wife along by the chain, for she had long refused, as if fairly frantic, to desert the dying girl who had nursed her child so faithfully.  Again and again the doubly desolate woman looked back toward the companion whom she had abandoned in her suffering until they reached Frankfort.  There Gitta left Cyriax and accompanied Ratz.  The cart in which her child had lived and died, not its repulsive owner, induced her to sever the bond which, for nine years, had bound her to the blasphemer.

The travelling scholars set off singing merrily; but the strolling musicians waited for the ship to sail down the Main, on whose voyage they could earn money and have plenty to drink.

The vagrants tramped along the highway, one after another, without troubling themselves about the dying ropedancer.

“Everybody finds it hard enough to bear his own cross,” said Jungel, seizing his long crutches.  Only “Dancing Gundel” lingered in Miltenberg through sympathy in the fate of the companion who had reached the height of fame, while she, the former “Phyllis,” had gone swiftly downhill.  It was a Christian duty, she said to the blind boy who begged their bread, not to let Kuni, who had once held so lofty a position, take the last journey without a suitable escort.  When she heard that her former companion had received the sacrament, she exclaimed to her blind son, while slicing garlic into the barley porridge:  “She will now be at rest.  We shall earn a pretty penny at the mass in Frankfort if you can only manage to look as sorrowful when you hold out your hand as you do now!”

The monks, the dealer in indulgences, the burghers and artisans who were just preparing to embark for the voyage down the Main, gazed in bewilderment at the distinguished gentlemen who, incredible as it seemed, had actually—­for Dietel said so—­foregone their morning nap for the sake of a vagabond girl.  The feather-curler shook his head as if something marvellous had happened when he heard the ambassador of the Honourable Council of his own native city, the distinguished Herr Lienhard Groland, say to old Doctor Schedel: 

“I will wait here with you, my venerable friend.  Since the poor girl can live only a few hours longer, I can join the others, if I hurry, before they leave Frankfort.”

“That’s right, Lienhard,” cried Wilibald Pirckheimer, and the Abbot of St. AEgidius added approvingly: 

“You will thereby do something which is pleasing in the sight of Heaven.  Yes, gentlemen, I repeat it:  there are few deathbeds beside which I have found so little reason to be ashamed of the fate of being a mortal as by the humble couch of this vagabond girl.  If, before the judgment seat above, intention and faith are weighed with the same scales as works, few who close their eyes behind silken curtains will be so sure of a favourable sentence as this poorest of the poor.”