From the first Kuni had believed that she knew who was being borne to the grave.  Now she heard several women whispering near her mention the name of Juliane Peutinger.  A pale-faced gold embroiderer, who had recently bordered a gala dress with leaves and tendrils for the dead girl’s sister, described, sobbing, the severe suffering amid which this fairest blossom of Augsburg girlhood had withered ere death finally broke the slender stem.

Suddenly she stopped; a cry of mingled astonishment, lamentation, and delight, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, ran through the crowd which had gathered along the sides of the street.

The bier was in sight.

Twelve youths bore the framework, covered with a richly embroidered blue cloth, on which the coffin rested.  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.