arcely
lowered the strange tones of his voice, yet of all the rabble who
surrounded him only two persons understood his meaning--a fading, sickly
girl, and the red-haired woman, only a few years her senior, who led the
swearing man by a chain, like a tame bear.

The Nuremberg magistrates had had Cyriax's tongue cropped for gross
blasphemy, and listeners could scarcely comprehend the words he mangled
in his gasping speech.

The red-haired woman dropped the knife with which she was slicing bread
and onions into a pot, and looked at her companion with an anxious,
questioning glance.

"Nuremberg Honourables," he stammered as fast as he could, snatched his
wife's shawl from her shoulders, and drew it over his unkempt head.

The woman beckoned to their travelling companions--a lame fellow of
middle age who, propped on crutches, leaned against the wall, an older
pock-marked man with a bloated face, and the sickly girl--calling to them
in the harsh, metallic voice peculiar to hawkers and elderly singers at
fairs.

"Help Cyriax hide. You first, Jungel! They needn't recognise him as soon
as they get in. Nuremberg magistrates are coming. Aristocratic
blood-suckers of the Council. Who knows what may still be on the tally
for us?"

Kuni, the pale-faced girl, wrapped her bright-coloured garment tighter
around her mutilated left leg, and obeyed. Lame Jungel, too, prepared to
fulfil red-haired Gitta's wish.

But Raban had glanced out, and hastily drew the cloth jerkin, patched
with green and blue linen, closer through his belt, ejaculating
anxiously:

"Young Groland of the Council. I know him."

This exclamation induced the other vagabonds to glide along the wall to
the nearest door, intending to slip out.

"A Groland?" asked Gitta, Cyriax's wife, cowering as if threatened with a
blow from an invisible hand. "It was he--"

"He?" laughed the chain-bearer, while he crouched beside her, drawing
himself into the smallest space possible. "No, Redhead! The devil dragged
the man who did that down to the lower regions long ago, on account of my
tongue. It's his son. The younger, the sharper. This stripling made
Casper Rubling,--[Dice, in gambler's slang]--poor wretch, pay for his
loaded dice with his eyesight."

He thrust his hand hurriedly into his jerkin as he spoke, and gave Gitta
something which he had concealed there. It was a set of dice, but, with
ready presence of mind, she pressed them so hard into the crumb of the
lo