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Leila’s funeral took place the next day, the lovely waxen figure carried on a bier strown with flowers. The family surrounded their dead, a procession of friends preceding and following. The child’s home had been in one of the smaller apartments of the cross-streets, reached by stairways under the arches; and as it was the custom for funerals to approach the Basilica by the avenue, they came across to the eastward through alternating light and shadow, and, reaching the outer street, returned by the bridge in front of the Arcade, the bells ringing à morto as they passed through the avenue. But it was not the clash of all the bells together. It was a plaintive dropping, a tone or a chord, like dropping tears.
“Will they not enter?” Tacita asked in a whisper of Elena when she saw that no
