She had often urged her, too, to think of old age, but Kuni--never cared for any one longer than a few weeks, though there were some whom she might easily have induced to offer her the wedding ring.
She glanced at Kuni again, but, perceiving that the girl did not yet vouchsafe her even a single look, she was vexed, and, moving nearer to Cyriax, she added in a still lower tone: "A more inconstant, faithless, colder heart than hers I never met, even among the most disorderly of Loni's band; for, blindly as the infatuated lovers obeyed every one of her crazy whims, she laughed at the best and truest.

'I hate them all,' she would say.

'I wouldn't let one of them even touch me with the tip of his finger if I could not use their zecchins.

'With these,' she said, 'she would help the rich to restore to the poor what they had stolen from them.' She really treated many a worthy gentleman like a dog, nay, a great deal worse; for she was tender enough to all the animals that travelled with the company; the poodles and the ponies, nay, even the parrots and the doves.

She would play with the children, too, even the smallest ones--isn't that so, Peperle ?--like their own silly mothers." She smoothed the blind boy's golden hair as she spoke, then added, sighing: "But the little fellow was too young to remember it.