He confided his feelings, and the fact that he knew the artist, to his young neighbour, but she had turned deadly pale and lowered her eyes.  While looking on she had felt as though she herself was in danger of falling into the depths.  Giddiness had seized her, and her heart, whose tendency to disease had long awakened the apprehension of the physicians, contracted convulsively.  The sight of a fellow-being hovering in mortal peril above her head seemed unendurable.  Not until she followed Lienhard’s advice and avoided looking up, did she regain her calmness.  Her changeful temperament soon recovered its former cheerfulness, and the friend at her side to whom the lovely child, with her precocious mental development, appeared like the fairest marvel, took care, often as he himself looked upward, that she should be guarded from a second attack of weakness.

The storm of applause from below, in which Lienhard also joined, fanned the flames of desire for admiration in Kuni’s breast to a fiery glow.  She would show him, too, what she could do—­compel him to applaud her.  She would force him away from the little temptress, and oblige him to gaze up at her whose art—­she learned this daily—­possessed the power to fix the attention of spectators like the thrall of the basilisk’s eye.  When on the rope she was no insignificant personage.  He should tremble for her as did the gray-haired, scarred captain of the foot soldiers, Mannsbach, the day before yesterday.  He had told her that his heart had throbbed more anxiously during her daring feats than on the bloodiest field of battle.

She moved forward more swiftly to the time of the lively dancing tune which the city pipers were playing.  Midway along the rope she turned, ran back to the cross-shaped trestle at the steeple window, handed the balancing pole to Loni, and received a cage filled with doves.  Each one bore around its neck a note containing an expression of homage to the Emperor Maximilian, and they were all trained to alight near the richly decorated throne which was now occupied by the chivalrous monarch.  The clown who, with a comical show of respect, offered her what she needed for her next feat, told her this.

Loni, sure of being heard by no unbidden ear, called to her from the window: 

“Art is honoured to-day, my girl.”

The clown added jocosely: 

“Who else was ever permitted to walk over the anointed head of our lord the Emperor?”

But Kuni would not have needed such encouragement.  Doubtless she felt flattered by the consciousness of attracting even the sovereign’s glance, but what she intended to do immediately was for the purpose of compelling another person to watch her steps with fear and admiration.  Crossing her feet, she threw back her garlanded head and drew a long breath.  Then she hastily straightened herself, and with the bird cage in one hand and the winged staff of Mercury, which the clown had handed to her, in the other, she