Listening intently, she said to herself that, during the many thousand times when she had talked with him in fancy, it had also seemed as if she heard him speak.  And the same experience had befallen her eyes; for whenever memory reverted to those distant days, she had beheld him just as he now looked standing on the threshold, where he was detained by the landlady of The Pike.  Only his face had become still more manly, his bearing more dignified.  The pleasant, winning expression of the bearded lips remained unchanged, and more than once she had seen his eyes sparkle with a far warmer light than now, while he was thanking the portly woman for her cordial welcome.

While Kuni’s gaze still rested upon him as if spellbound, Cyriax nudged her, stammering hurriedly: 

“They will have to pass us.  Move forward, women, in front of me.  Spread out your skirt, you Redhead!  It might be my death if yonder Nuremberg fine gentleman should see me here and recollect one thing and another.”

As he spoke he dragged Kuni roughly from the window, flung the sack which he had brought in from the cart down before him, and made them sit on it, while he stretched himself on the floor face downward, and pretended to be asleep behind the women.

This suited Kuni.  If Lienhard Groland passed her now he could not help seeing her, and she had no greater desire than to meet his glance once more before her life ended.  Yet she dreaded this meeting with an intensity plainly revealed by the passionate throbbing of her heart and the panting of her weakened lungs.  There was a rushing noise in her ears, and her eyes grew dim.  Yet she was obliged to keep them wide open—­what might not the next moment bring?

For the first time since her entrance she gazed around the large, long apartment, which would have deserved the name of hall had it not been too low.

The heated room, filled with buzzing flies, was crowded with travellers.  The wife and daughter of a feather-curler, who were on their way with the husband and father to the Reichstag, where many an aristocratic gentleman would need plumes for his own head and his wife’s, had just dropped the comb with which they were arranging each other’s hair.  The shoemaker and his dame from Nuremberg paused in the sensible lecture they were alternately addressing to their apprentices.  The Frankfort messenger put down the needle with which he was mending the badgerskin in his knapsack.  The travelling musicians who, to save a few pennies, had begun to eat bread, cheese, and radishes, instead of the warm meals provided for the others, let their knives drop and set down the wine-jugs.  The traders, who were hotly arguing over Italian politics and the future war with Turkey, were silent.  The four monks, who had leaned their heads against the cornice of the wide, closed fireplace and, in spite of the flies which buzzed around them, had fallen asleep, awoke.  The vender of indulgences in the black