accidental meeting has taken place, I may have the privilege
of saying adieu to your ladyship."

"Yes--" said Adelaide, in a strange, low, much-moved tone.

I felt uneasy, I was sorry this meeting had taken place. The shock
and revulsion of feeling for Adelaide, after she had been securely
calculating that von Francius was a hundred miles on his way to ----,
was too severe. I could tell from the very _timbre_ of her voice and its
faint vibration how agitated she was, and as she seated herself again
beside me, I felt that she trembled like a reed.

"It is more happiness than I expected," went on von Francius, and his
voice too was agitated. Oh, if he would only say "Farewell," and go!

"Happiness!" echoed Adelaide, in a tone whose wretchedness was too deep
for tears.

"Ah! You correct me. Still it is a happiness; there are some kinds of
joy which one can not distinguish from griefs, my lady, until one comes
to think that one might have been without them, and then one knows their
real nature."

She clasped her hands. I saw her bosom rise and fall with long, stormy
breaths.

I trembled for both; for Adelaide, whose emotion and anguish were, I
saw, mastering her; for von Francius, because if Adelaide failed he must
find it almost impossible to repulse her.

"Herr von Francius," said I, in a quick, low voice, making one step
toward him, and laying my hand upon his arm, "leave us! If you do love
us," I added, in a whisper, "leave us! Adelaide, say good-bye to
him--let him go!"

"You are right," said von Francius to me, before Adelaide had time to
speak; "you are quite right."

A pause. He stepped up to Adelaide. I dared not interfere. Their eyes
met, and his will not to yield produced the same in her, in the shape of
a passive, voiceless acquiescence in his proceedings. He took her hands,
saying:

"My lady, adieu! Heaven send you peace, or death, which brings it,
or--whatever is best."

Loosing her hands he turned to me, saying distinctly:

"As you are a woman, and her sister, do not forsake her now."

Then he was gone. She raised her arms and half fell against the trunk of
the giant acacia beneath which we had been sitting, face forward, as if
drunk with misery.

Von Francius, strong and generous, whose very submission seemed to brace
one to meet trouble with a calmer, firmer front, was gone. I raised
my eyes, and did not even feel startled, only darkly certain that
Adelaide's evil star was high in the h