Already, for so little of life, she was to endure the pain of death.
Day after day, hour after hour, Antony hung over her bed, with a devotion and an unconsciousness of fatigue that made Beatrice look at him with astonishment, and sometimes even for a moment forget Wonder in the joy with which she saw him transfigured by simple human love.

Now, when it was too late, he had become a father indeed.

And it brought some ease to his fiercely tortured heart to notice that it was his ministrations that the dying child seemed to welcome most.

For the most part she lay in a semi-conscious state, heeding nothing, and only moaning now and again, a sad little moan, like an injured bird.

She seemed to say she was so little a thing to suffer so.