absent
demeanor with the words, "I love that man who is disgraced?" I smiled
dryly in the midst of my anguish, and locked it the deeper in my own
breast.

I had believed in him so devotedly, so intensely, had loved him so
entirely, and with such a humility, such a consciousness of my own
shortcomings and of his superiority. The recoil at first was such as one
might experience who embraces a veiled figure, presses his lips to where
its lips should be, and finds that he kisses a corpse.

Such, I say, was the recoil at first. But a recoil, from its very
nature, is short and vehement. There are some natures, I believe, which
after a shock turn and flee from the shocking agent. Not so I. After
figuratively springing back and pressing my hands over my eyes, I
removed them again, and still saw his face--and it tortured me to have
to own it, but I had to do so--still loved that face beyond all earthly
things.

It grew by degrees familiar to me again. I caught myself thinking of the
past and smiling at the remembrance of the jokes between Eugen and
Helfen on Carnival Monday, then pulled myself up with a feeling of
horror, and the conviction that I had no business to be thinking of him
at all. But I did think of him day by day and hour by hour, and tortured
myself with thinking of him, and wished, yet dreaded, to see him, and
wondered how I possibly could see him, and could only live on in a hope
which was not fulfilled. For I had no right to seek him out. His
condition might be much--very much to me. My sympathy or pity or
thought--as I felt all too keenly--could be nothing to him.

Meanwhile, as is usual in such cases, circumstance composedly took my
affairs into her hands and settled them for me without my being able to
move a finger in the matter.

The time was approaching for the departure of von Francius. Adelaide and
I did not exchange a syllable upon the subject. Of what use? I knew to a
certain extent what was passing within her. I knew that this child of
the world--were we not all children of the world, and not of light?--had
braced her moral forces to meet the worst, and was awaiting it calmly.

Adelaide, like me, based her actions not upon religion. Religion was for
both of us an utter abstraction; it touched us not. That which gave
Adelaide force to withstand temptation, and to remain stoically in the
drear sphere in which she already found herself, was not religion; it
was pride on the one hand, and on the o