met with the accident and had understood how to keep what she earned.  But she could not hold on to her gold.  She had flung it away like useless rubbish.  So long as she possessed anything there had been no want in Loni’s company.  She, Gundel, had caught her arm more than once when she was going to fling Hungarian ducats, instead of coppers, to good-for-nothing beggars.  She had often urged her, too, to think of old age, but Kuni—­never cared for any one longer than a few weeks, though there were some whom she might easily have induced to offer her the wedding ring.

She glanced at Kuni again, but, perceiving that the girl did not yet vouchsafe her even a single look, she was vexed, and, moving nearer to Cyriax, she added in a still lower tone: 

“A more inconstant, faithless, colder heart than hers I never met, even among the most disorderly of Loni’s band; for, blindly as the infatuated lovers obeyed every one of her crazy whims, she laughed at the best and truest.  ‘I hate them all,’ she would say.  ’I wouldn’t let one of them even touch me with the tip of his finger if I could not use their zecchins.  ‘With these,’ she said, ’she would help the rich to restore to the poor what they had stolen from them.’  She really treated many a worthy gentleman like a dog, nay, a great deal worse; for she was tender enough to all the animals that travelled with the company; the poodles and the ponies, nay, even the parrots and the doves.  She would play with the children, too, even the smallest ones—­isn’t that so, Peperle?—­like their own silly mothers.”  She smoothed the blind boy’s golden hair as she spoke, then added, sighing: 

“But the little fellow was too young to remember it.  The rattle which she gave him at Augsburg—­it was just before the accident—­because she was so fond of him—­Saint Kunigunde, how could we keep such worthless jewels in our sore need?—­was made of pure silver.  True, the simpletons who were so madly in love with her, and with whom she played so cruelly, would have believed her capable of anything sooner than such kindness.  There was a Swabian knight, a young fellow——­”

Here she stopped, for Cyriax and the other vagabonds, even the girl of whom she was speaking, had started up and were gazing at the door.

Kuni opened her eyes as wide as if a miracle had happened, and the crimson spots on her sunken cheeks betrayed how deeply she was agitated.  But she had never experienced anything of this kind; for while thinking of the time when, through Lienhard Groland’s intercession, she had entered the house of the wealthy old Frau Schurstab, in order to become estranged from a vagabond life, and recalling how once, when he saw her sorrowful there, he had spoken kindly to her, it seemed as if she had actually heard his own voice.  As it still appeared to echo in her ears, she suddenly became aware that the words really did proceed from his lips.  What she had heard in her dream and what now came from his own mouth, as he stood at the door, blended into one.  She would never have believed that the power of imagination could reproduce anything so faithfully.