ther love for Max von Francius.

Pride forbade her to forfeit her reputation, which was dear to her,
though her position had lost the charms with which distance had once
gilded it for her. Love for von Francius made her struggle with all the
force of her nature to remain where she was, renounce him blamelessly
rather than yield at the price which women must pay who do such things
as leave their husbands.

It was wonderful to me to see how love had developed in her every higher
emotion. I remembered how cynical she had always been as to the merits
of her own sex. Women, according to her, were an inferior race, who
gained their poor ends by poor means. She had never been hard upon
female trickery and subterfuge. Bah! she said, how else are they to get
what they want? But now with the exalted opinion of a man, had come
exalted ideas as to the woman fit for his wife.

Since to go to him she must be stained and marked forever, she would
remain away from him. Never should any circumstance connected with him
be made small or contemptible by any act of hers. I read the motive,
and, reading it, read her.

Von Francius was, equally with herself, distinctly and emphatically a
child of the world--as she honored him he honored her. He proved his
strength and the innate nobility of his nature by his stoic abstinence
from evasion of or rebellion against the decree which had gone out
against their love. He was a better man, a greater artist, a more
sympathetic nature now than before. His passage through the furnace
had cleansed him. He was a standing example to me that despite what
our preachers and our poets, our philosophers and our novelists
are incessantly dinning into our ears, there are yet men who can
renounce--men to whom honor and purity are still the highest goddesses.

I saw him, naturally, and often during these days--so dark for all of
us. He spoke to me of his prospects in his new post. He asked me if I
would write to him occasionally, even if it should be only three or four
times in the year.

"Indeed I will, if you care to hear from me," said I, much moved.

This was at our last music lesson, in my dark little room at the
Wehrhahn. Von Francius had made it indeed a lesson, more than a lesson,
a remembrance to carry with me forever, for he had been playing
Beethoven and Schubert to me.

"Fraeulein May, everything concerning you and yours will ever be of the
very deepest interest to me," he said, looking earnestl