ed. It was open, and the dead girl's
couch was so high that it seemed as though the sleeper was only resting
lightly on the white silk pillow. A wreath again encircled her head, but
this time blossoming myrtles blended with the laurel in the brown curls
that lay in thick, soft locks on the snowy pillows and the lace-trimmed
shroud.

Juliane's eyes were closed. Ah! how gladly Kuni would have kissed those
long-lashed lids to win even one look of forgiveness from her whom her
curse had perhaps snatched from the green spring world!

She remembered the sunny radiance with which this sleeper's eyes had
sparkled as they met Lienhard's. They were the pure mirror of the keen,
mobile intellect and the innocent, loving soul of this rare child. Now
death had closed them, and Juliane's end had been one of suffering.
The pale embroiderer had said so, and the sorrowful droop of the sweet
little mouth, which gave the wondrously beautiful, delicate, touching
little face so pathetic an expression, betrayed it. If the living girl
had measured her own young intellect with that of grown people, and her
face had worn the impress of precocious maturity, now it was that of a
charming child who had died in suffering.

Kuni also felt this, and asked herself how it had been possible for her
heart to cherish such fierce hatred against this little one, who had
numbered only eleven years.

But had this Juliane resembled other children?

No, no! No Emperor's daughter of her age would have been accompanied to
the churchyard with such pageantry, such deep, universal grief.

She had been the jewel of a great city. This was proclaimed by many
a Greek and Latin maxim on tablets borne by the friends of the great
humanist who, with joyful pride, called her his daughter.

Kuni could not read, but she heard at least one sentence translated by
a Benedictine monk to the nun at his side: "He whose death compels those
who knew him to weep, has the fairest end."--[Seneca, Hippol., 881.]

If this were true, Juliane's end was indeed fair; for she herself, whom
the child had met only to inflict pain, had her eyes dimmed by tears,
and wherever she turned she saw people weeping.

Most of those who lined the street could have had no close relations
with the dead girl. But yonder black-robed mourners who followed the
bier were her parents, her brothers and sisters, her nearest relatives,
the members of the Council, and the family servants. And she, the
wretched