without us, if we're too bad for you."

"We are not under eternal obligations to you on the child's account,"
added red-haired Gitta in a gentler tone. "Don't vex my husband, or
he'll keep his word about the cart, and who else will be bothered with a
useless creature like you?"

The girl lowered her eyes and looked at her crippled limb.

How would she get on without the cart, which received her when the pain
grew too sharp and the road was too hard and long?

So she turned to the others again, saying soothingly:

"It all happened in the time before I fell." Then she looked out of
doors once more, but she did not find what she sought. The Nuremberg
travellers had ridden through the broad gateway into the large square
courtyard, surrounded by stables on three sides. When Cyriax and his
wife again called to her, desiring to know what had passed between her
and Groland, she clasped her hands around her knees, fixed her eyes on
the gaystuffs wound around the stump where her foot had been amputated,
and in a low, reluctant tone, continued:

"You want to learn what I have to do with Herr Groland? It was about six
years ago, in front of St. Sebald's church, in Nuremberg. A wedding was
to take place. The bridegroom was one of the Council--Lienhard Groland.
The marriage was to be a very quiet one--the bridegroom's father lay
seriously ill. Yet there could have been no greater throng at the
Emperor's nuptials. I stood in the midst of the crowd. A rosary dropped
from the belt of the fat wife of a master workman--she was decked out