From the day his daughter's health began to fail, and the appearance of lung trouble made the future full of fear, Signor Provana made up his mind that her life should never be the common lot of invalids. However few the years she had to live, however inevitable that she was to die in early youth--the years that were hers should not be treated as a long illness. The horrible monotony of sick rooms should never be hers. It should be the business of everybody about her to keep the dark secret of decay. Her trained nurses were not to be called nurses, but maids, and were to wear no hospital uniform. Everything about her was to be gay and fair to look upon--a luxury of colour and light. And she was to enjoy every amusement that was possible for her without actual risk. Into that brief life all the best things that earth can give were to be crowded. She was to know the cleverest and most agreeable people. She was to read the best books, to hear the most exquisite music, to see the finest pictures, the most gifted actors. Nothing famous or beautiful was to be kept from her. From the first note of warning this had been Giulia's education; and Miss Thompson's chief duty had been to read the best books of the best writers to an intelligent and sympathetic pupil. There had been no dull lessons, no long exercises in the grammar of various tongues--Giulia's education after her fifteenth birthday had been literature, in the best sense of that sometimes ill-used word. Signor Provana's system had been so far successful that his daughter had lived much longer than the specialists had expected, and her girlhood had been utterly happy. But the shadow was always in the background of their lives, and wherever he went with his idolised child there was always the fear that he might leave her among the flowers and the palm groves that filled her with joyous surprise on their arrival, and go back to his workaday life lonely and desolate. Vera was astonished at the things Giulia knew, and was sorely ashamed of her own ignorance. For the first time in her life she had come into close association with cultivated minds--with people whose conversation, though without pedantry, was full of allusions to books that she had never read, and knowledge that she had never heard of. To know Giulia and her governess was a liberal education; and Vera showed a quickness in absorbing knowledge that interested her new friends, and made them eager to help her. The world of poetry lay open and untrodden before this daughter of a poet. The idea of her friend's parentage fascinated Giulia. "Does she not look like a poet's daughter?" she asked her father, and Provana assented with smiling interest. "All Giulia's geese are swans," he said; "but I believe she has found a real swan this time."