. He was a pretty child, who showed no traces of the poverty in
which he had been reared. Beside the widow were two little girls about
six years old. The one at the left was sound asleep, with her head
resting on her little fat arm. The other, at the sick woman's right,
pressed her fair head upon her breast. Her slumber was very light, and
she often opened her large, blue eyes and gazed with touching anxiety at
the sick woman. This was the adopted child, Walpurga, and never had the
matron beheld amongst the poor and suffering so lovely a human flower as
this little six-year-old child, struggling with sleep in her affectionate
desire to render aid. The other little girl's free hand also touched her
mother, and thus these four, united in poverty and sorrow, but also in
love, seemed to form a single whole. What a peaceful, charming picture!

Frau Christine gazed with earnest sympathy at each member of this group.
How well-formed was every one! how pure and innocent the features of the
children looked! how kind and loving those of the suffering mother, who
was a thief, and whose tender back had felt the scourge of the
executioner!

The thought made her shudder. But when little Walpurga, half asleep,
raised her tiny hand and lovingly stroked the wounded shoulder of her
adopted mother, the matron, as usual when anything pleasant moved her
heart, longed to have her husband at her side. How easily, since he was
so near, she could afford him a sight of this touching picture! It should
prove that she had been right to let Eva remain here.

Faithful to her custom of permitting no delay in the execution of a good
resolution, she wanted to send Katterle to call her husband, but the girl
could not be found.

Then Frau Christine went herself, beckoning to Eva to follow; but they
had scarcely reached the centre of the room when a peal of shrill
laughter greeted them from a couch on the left.

The person from whom it came was the barber's widow, whose attack had
alarmed Eva so terribly the day before in front of the pillory. It pealed
loudly and shrilly through the stillness of the night, and when the
matron turned angrily to reprove the person who so inconsiderately
disturbed the rest of the others, the woman clapped her hands and
instantly a chorus of sharp, screaming voices rose around her. The
barber's widow, who knew everybody who lived in Nuremberg, had recognised
the magistrate's wife at her entrance, and secretly incited her