ons were both strongly enlisted on
the other side. Indeed, with the single exception of the general unfitness
of a union between two of unequal stations, there was nothing to
discredit her choice, if that may be termed choice which, after all, was
more the result of spontaneous feeling and secret sympathy than of any
other cause, unless it were a certain equivocal reserve, and a manifest
uneasiness, whenever allusion was made to the early history and to the
family of the soldier. This sensitiveness on the part of Sigismund had
been observed and commented on by others as well as by herself, and it had
been openly ascribed to the mortification of one who had been thrown, by
chance, into an intimate association that was much superior to what he was
entitled to maintain by birth; a weakness but too common, and which few
have strength of mind to resist or sufficient pride to overcome. The
intuitive watchfulness of affection, however, led Adelheid to a different
conclusion; she saw that he never affected to conceal, while with equal
good taste he abstained from obtrusive allusions to the humble nature of
his origin, but she also perceived that there were points of his previous
history on which he was acutely sensitive, and which at first she feared
must be attributed to the consciousness of acts that his clear perception
of moral truth condemned, and which he could wish forgotten. For some time
Adelheid clung to this discovery as to a healthful and proper antidote to
her own truant inclinations, but native rectitude banished a suspicion
which had no sufficient ground, as equally unworthy of them both. The
effects of a ceaseless mental struggle, and of the fruitlessness of her
efforts to overcome her tenderness in behalf of Sigismund, have been
described in the fading of her bloom, in the painful solicitude of a
countenance naturally so sweet, and in the settled melancholy of her
playful and mellow eye. These were the real causes of the journey
undertaken by her father, and, in truth, of most of the other events
which we are about to describe.

The prospect of the future had undergone a sudden change. The color,
though more the effect of excitement than of returning health--for he tide
of life, when rudely checked, does not resume its currents at the first
breath of happiness--again brightened her cheek and imparted brilliancy to
her looks, and smiles stole easily to those lips which had long been
growing pallid with anxiety. S