n-law, he would like to
drink him a pledge that should burn like the plague and ruin.

He snatched a flask from his pocket as he spoke, and after a long pull
and a still longer "A-ah!" he stammered:

"I've been obliged to bid farewell to my tongue, yet it feels as if it
were sticking in my throat like the dry sole of a shoe. That's what comes
from talking in this dog-day heat."

He looked into the empty bottle and was about to send Kuni out to fill it
again. In turning to do so he saw her pale face, wan with suffering, but
which now glowed with a happy light that lent it a strange beauty. How
large her blue eyes were! When he had picked her up in Spain she was
already a cripple and in sore distress. But Groland probably knew what he
was about when he released her. She must have been a pretty creature
enough at that time, and he knew that before her fall she was considered
one of the most skilful rope-dancers.

An elderly woman with a boy, whose blindness helped her to arouse
compassion, was crouching by Raban's side, and had just been greeted by
Kuni as an old acquaintance. They had journeyed from land to land in
Loni's famous troupe, and as Raban handed Cyriax his own bottle, he
turned from the dreaming girl, whose services he no longer needed, and
whispered to the blind boy's mother--who among the people of her own
calling still went by the name of Dancing Gundel--the question whether
yonder ailing cripple had once had any good looks, and what position she
had held among rope-dancers.

The little gray-haired woman looked up with sparkling eyes. Under the
name of "Phyllis" she had earned, ere her limbs were stiffened by age,
great applause by her dainty egg-dance and all sorts of feats with the
balancing pole. The manager of the band had finally given her the
position of crier to support herself and her blind boy. This had made her
voice so hollow and hoarse that it was difficult to understand her as,
with fervid eloquence, vainly striving to be heard by absent-minded Kuni,
she began: "She surpassed even Maravella the Spaniard. And her feats at
Augsburg during the Reichstag--I tell you, Cyriax, when she ascended the
rope to the belfry, with the pole and without--"

"I've just heard of that from another quarter," he interrupted. "What I
want to know is whether she pleased the eyes of men."

"What's that to you?" interposed red-haired Gitta jealously, trying to
draw him away from Gundel by the chain.

Raban laug