kled 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, reckless,
sinful, crippled strolling player, for whom not a soul on earth cared,
whose death would not have drawn even a single tear from any eye, to whom
a speedy end could be only a benefit, was perhaps the cause of the
premature drying up of this pure fountain of joy, which had refreshed so
many hearts and animated them with the fairest hopes.

The tall lady, whose noble face and majestic figure were shrouded in a
thick veil, was Juliane's mother--and she had offered the sick ropedancer
a home in her wealthy household.

"If she had only known," thought Kuni, "the injury I was inflicting upon
her h