farewell to her
departing husband. As soon as he had disappeared, all the suppressed
anguish of the last few days had found vent in a flood of tears, but
without relief to the poor aching heart. When the torrent was at last
exhausted, she only gazed the more hopelessly into vacancy with burning
eyes, as if staring into a grey, impenetrable mist, from which no
familiar form emerged, no loving voice reached her ear. The week that
Edwin was to be absent, now seemed to her like a respite. During that
time she might groan in anguish and weep to her heart's content. When
he returned, he should find her what she had always been to him--his
brave friend, his faithful comrade, to whom his inmost soul was
revealed, even if a passion for a strange woman, the very root of which
had seemed to have been destroyed, now flourished luxuriantly anew.
True, how could he know that she herself was only a weak woman, who
felt all her wise thoughts and heroic reason vanishing in a boundless
longing for his love!

A strange reserve, or perhaps pride because he had never asked, had
prevented her from telling him this.

But he _needed_ passionate love--in her terror this had now become
evident to her. The cooler his head was, the more vehemently his heart
demanded boundless, self-forgetful folly, a love higher than reason. He
had now found it--in the magic castle, where the old demon had resumed
its sway over him. The enchantress herself had cast aside her black art
to practise a more powerful and irresistible one--to throw herself into
his arms in the guise of a poor helpless woman saying: "I am yours; do
with me as you will." And was he to disdain all this and reply: "You
come too late?"--Well, he _had_ said so. He knew what he owed to duty.
But to accept this martyrdom, to hold a man by an iron chain, against
which every instinct of his blood rebelled--a feverish chill ran
through her frame at the thought.

True, she might stake passion against passion, and see which would
conquer, hers that was really no tamer and narrower than any ever
offered by a woman to the man she loved, or the capricious one of this
stranger, who now when it was too late, wanted to throw away a lost
life, to regain her happiness in her saviour. But her pride rebelled
against this also. Had he ever missed her passionate love? Could he
believe, now that she had so long denied it utterance, that it was
really true and genuine, not an ebullition of jealous pain, rathe