groan or cry, tear or shiver. It struck
home to me. The heavens were riven asunder--a flash came from them,
descended upon my head, and left me desolate. I stood, I know not how
long, stock-still in the place where I had read that letter. In novels I
had read of such things; they had had little meaning for me. In real
life I had only heard them mentioned dimly and distantly, and here I
was face to face with the awful thing, and so far from being able to
deal out hearty, untempered condemnation, I found that the words of
Adelaide's letter came to me like throes of a real heart. Bald, dry,
disjointed sentences on the outside; without feeling they might seem,
but to me they were the breathless exclamations of a soul in supreme
torture and peril. My sister! with what a passion of love my heart went
out to her. Think of you, Adelaide, and think of you not too hardly? Oh,
why did not you trust me more?

I saw her as she wrote these words: "I have made a great mess of it." To
make a mess of one's life--one mistake after another, till what might
have been at least honest, pure, and of good report, becomes a stained,
limp, unsightly thing, at which men feel that they may gaze openly, and
from which women turn away in scorn unutterable; and that Adelaide, my
proudest of proud sisters, had come to this!

I was not thinking of what people would say. I was not wondering how it
had come about; I was feeling Adelaide's words ever more and more
acutely, till they seemed to stand out from the paper and turn into
cries of anguish in my very ears. I put my hands to my ears; I could not
bear those notes of despair.

"What will be the end of me?" she said, and I shook from head to foot as
I repeated the question. If her will and that of von Francius ever came
in contact. She had put herself at his mercy utterly; her whole future
now depended upon the good pleasure of a man--and men were selfish.

With a faint cry of terror and foreboding, I felt everything whirl
unsteadily around me; the letter fell from my hand; the icy band that
had held me fast gave way. All things faded before me, and I scarcely
knew that I was sinking upon the floor. I thought I was dying; then
thought faded with the consciousness that brings it.

CHAPTER XXXV.

"Allein, allein! und so soll ich genesen?
Allein, allein! und das des Schicksals Segen!
Allein, allein! O Gott, ein einzig Wesen,
Um dieses Haupt an seine Brust zu legen!"

I had a sharp, i