"I will go,"--said Julius hesitatingly, but with quiverings in his face,--"although the sun is not down. My father shall console me till sundown, that my heart may not beat so violently against my breast, when I stand at the grave and make the offering to the dead."----Let me say nothing, reader, of the choking heart with which I proceed,--nor of this too sensitive Giulia, who like a morning sun-dial was ere noon in shade and coolness, who, like a dove, unfolded her wings to the rain and to tears,--nor of her soul's-sisters, who in the second decade of life hang, the skeleton of death all over with flowers, that they may not be able to see its limbs, and who rest their white arm merely on a myrtle-twig of love as upon a bleeding-support, and watch calmly the bleeding to death of its severed veins!-- I could not have said even this, if Victor had not thought it, whose heart was mortally distraught by an infinite grief and an infinite love; for ah! how far on the way was not his irreplaceable Clotilda already, to follow her friend and hide her unloved heart in the earth, as they lay down carnations in the frost? The sun sank lower, the moon mounted higher,--Victor saw Clotilda, like an ethereally embodied angel, reclining in a niche that opened towards the west,--the little girl mentioned yesterday played, in her lap, with a new doll,--it seemed to him as if he saw her soaring toward heaven, and when she lifted her great eyelids, weighed down with tears for the departed friend, whose secret she had long since guessed and concealed, towards him, who to-day increased them by his departure; and when she saw his face also melted in emotion; then did like sorrowful thoughts drown in both even the first sounds of welcome, and both turned away their faces, because they wept for the parting.----"Have you," said Clotilda, at least with a composed voice, "just spoken with Julius?"--Victor did not answer, but his eyes said yes, in the simple fact that they streamed more passionately and looked on her fixedly. She cast hers down with a slight blush for Giulia. The little child took the falling of the eyelids over the great drops for a sign of sleepiness, and drew the little hay-stuffed pillow away from the doll, spread it out for Clotilda, and said innocently, "There, lie down on it and go to sleep!" A shudder thrilled through her friend, as she answered, "Not to-day, dear; on pillows of hay only the dead sleep." He shuddered, as he saw a snow-white pink, in the centre of which there was a great dark-red point, like a bloody drop, trembling on her agitated bosom. The fearful pink seemed to him to be the lily which superstition formerly found in the choir-seat of the priest, whose death was said thereby to be predicted.