he who was obliged to pull his wife along by the chain, for she had long
refused, as if fairly frantic, to desert the dying girl who had nursed
her child so faithfully. Again and again the doubly desolate woman
looked back toward the companion whom she had abandoned in her suffering
until they reached Frankfort. There Gitta left Cyriax and accompanied
Ratz. The cart in which her child had lived and died, not its repulsive
owner, induced her to sever the bond which, for nine years, had bound her
to the blasphemer.

The travelling scholars set off singing merrily; but the strolling
musicians waited for the ship to sail down the Main, on whose voyage they
could earn money and have plenty to drink.

The vagrants tramped along the highway, one after another, without
troubling themselves about the dying ropedancer.

"Everybody finds it hard enough to bear his own cross," said Jungel,
seizing his long crutches. Only "Dancing Gundel" lingered in Miltenberg
through sympathy in the fate of the companion who had reached the height
of fame, while she, the former "Phyllis," had gone swiftly downhill.
It was a Christian duty, she said to the blind boy who begged their
bread, not to let Kuni, who had once held so lofty a position, take the
last journey without a suitable escort. When she heard that her former
companion had received the sacrament, she exclaimed to her blind son,
while slicing garlic into the barley porridge: "She will now be at rest.
We shall earn a pretty penny at the mass in Frankfort if you can only
manage to look as sorrowful when you hold out your hand as you do now!"

The monks, the dealer in indulgences, the burghers and artisans who
were just preparing to embark for the voyage down the Main, gazed in