"Water for the lady! the little lady is living no longer." CHAPTER XIX. Autumn, in its last days, smiles on people at times with immense sadness, but mildly, like a woman dying of decline. It was on such a mild day that Litka's funeral took place. There is pain mingled with a certain consolation in this,--that those left behind think of their dead and feel the loss of them. Pan Stanislav, occupied with the funeral, was penetrated by that calm and pensive day with still greater sadness; but, transferring Litka's feelings to himself, he thought that the child would have wished just such a day for her burial, and he found in this thought a certain solace. Till that moment he had not been able simply to measure his sorrow; such knowledge comes later, and begins only when the loved one is left in the graveyard, and a man returns by himself to his empty house. Besides, preparations for the funeral had consumed Pan Stanislav's whole time. Life has surrounded with artificial forms, and has complicated, such a simple act as death. Pan Stanislav wished to show Litka that last service, which, moreover, there was no one else to perform. All those springs of life through which man thinks, resolves, and acts, were severed in Pani Emilia by the death of her child. This time the wind seemed too keen for the fleece of the lamb. Happily, however, excessive pain either destroys itself, or benumbs the human heart. This happened with Pani Emilia. Pan Stanislav noticed that the predominant expression of her face and eyes was a measureless, rigid amazement. As in her eyes there were no tears, so in her mouth there were no words,--merely a kind of whisper, at once tragic and childish, showing that her thought did not take in the misfortune, but hovered around the minutiæ accompanying it; she seized at these, and attended to them with as much carefulness as if her child were alive yet. In the room, now turned into a chamber of mourning, Litka, reposing on a satin cushion amid flowers, could want nothing; meanwhile the heart of the mother, grown childish from pain, turned continually to this: what could be lacking to Litka? When they tried to remove her from the body, she offered no resistance; she merely lost the remnant of her consciousness, and began to groan, as if pained beyond endurance. Pan Stanislav and her husband's brother, Pan Hvastovski, who had come just before the funeral, strove to lead her away at the moment Litka was covered with the coffin-lid; but when Pani Emilia began to call the little one by name, courage failed the two men. The procession moved at last with numerous torches, and drew after it a train of carriages, preceded by priests, chanting gloomily, and surrounded by a crowd of the curious, who in modern cities feed their eyes with the sorrow of others, as in ancient times they fed them in the circus with the blood of people.