during
the last few months had vanished, not only because the tongueless
blasphemer had become a different person, and she sorely missed the
delicate little creature who had filled and cheered her heart, but she
had also lost the peace of mind which she enjoyed during the existence of
her charge.

The young Augsburg maiden, whom she thought she had bought out of the
flames of purgatory, did not appear to her again, but the vagrant's child
came all the more frequently, and whenever she showed herself she wailed
and wept bitterly. Sweet little Juli's soul must now--whether it had been
Juliane's or not--endure the tortures of purgatory, and this pierced
Kuni's heart the more deeply the more affectionately she remembered the
sickly-child.

Ever since she had used a black plaster, given to her at Singen by a
quack, the stump of her foot had become sore again, and sharp pain
tortured her so cruelly that, especially when the cough racked her
emaciated body and she was jolted to and fro in the springless cart over
stony roads, she was afraid that she should lose her reason.

At Pforzheim a barber had examined the wound and, shaking his head,
pronounced the black plaster a malignant blood poisoner, and when she
refused to have the leg amputated, applied a yellow one, which proved no
better. When Cyriax counted up his receipts in the evening, called to
red-haired Gitta his favourite maxim, "Fools never die," and handed to
her--Kuni--the larger brandy bottle to fill, she had often summoned up
her courage and begged him to buy an indulgence for his sweet little
Juli. The result was certain--she knew it from her own experience.

Shortly after the child's death he had thrust his hand into his purse
more than once at such an appeal and given money for a few candles, but
it had not been possible to persuade him to purchase the paper.

This refusal was by no means due to mere parsimony. Kuni knew what
induced him to maintain his resistance so obstinately, for in her
presence he had told pock-marked Ratz that he would not take the
indulgence gratis. Wherever he might be, his family ought to go, and he
did not wish to be anywhere that he would not find Juli.

He did not doubt the continued life of the soul after death, but
precisely because he was sure that the gates of paradise would remain
closed to him throughout eternity he would not help to open them for the
dead child. When his imagination tortured him with fancies that mice a