She was going to the cemetery, to her friend's grave. It was almost as if she were going to Giulia. She could not believe the bright spirit was quenched, although the lovely form had passed into everlasting darkness. Somewhere between earth and heaven that happy soul was conscious of the beauty of the world she had loved, and of the love that had been given to her--somewhere, not utterly beyond the reach of those who loved her, that sweet spirit was floating--not dead, but emancipated. Miss Thompson had told her of the heroic fortitude behind that light-hearted gaiety which had been Giulia's special charm. Although she was sustained by the unconsciousness of her doom, which goes so often with pulmonary disease, she had not been exempt from suffering. The sleepless night, the wearying cough, breathlessness, pain, exhaustion, fever, had all been borne with a sublime patience; and her only thought when the tardy morning stole at last upon the seeming endless night--had been of her father. He was never to be told she had slept badly--or had not slept at all--and it was her own cheerful voice that answered his inquiry as he stood at the half-open door: "Pretty well, _Padre mio, si, si_; not a bad night--a pretty good night--very good, upon the whole." No hint of the weariness, the suffering, of those long hours--and the nurse, though unwilling, had to indulge her, and allow the anxious father to be deceived. After all, as Miss Thompson said, a detail like that could not matter. He knew. Remembering this, it seemed to Vera that Giulia's death meant emancipation--a blessed escape from the mortal frame that was fraught with suffering, to the freedom of the immortal spirit, winged for its flight to higher horizons, a being with new capacities, new joys--yet not unremembering those beloved on earth, nay, with a higher power to love the clay-bound creatures it had loved when it was clay. In Vera's reverence for her father's genius, there had been much of the child's unquestioning faith in something it has been told to admire, for a considerable part of Lancelet Davis's poetry, and that which his review book showed to have been most appreciated by his critics, soared far beyond the limits of Vera's understanding. There were verses which she recited to herself again and again, with a delight in their music--verses where the words followed each other with an entrancing melodiousness--but for whose meaning she sought in vain. A Runic rhyme would have been as clear. She had repeated them dumbly in the dead hours of the night. Mellifluous lines that had a soothing charm. Lines that rose and fell like the waves of the sea; and lines drawn out in a slow monotony like the long, level stretch of wind-swept marshes--visions of white temples and strange goddesses; but they were shapeless as dreams to Vera--a confusion of lovely images without one distinct idea.