the lustre of a picture that fancy has so largely aided in
drawing, will understand the rude nature of the shock that she had
received. But Adelheid de Willading, though a woman in the liveliness and
fervor of her imagination, as well as in the proneness to conceive her own
ingenuous conceptions to be more founded in reality than a sterner view of
things might possibly have warranted, was a woman also in the more
generous qualities of the heart, and in those enduring principles, which
seem to have predisposed the better part of the sex to make the heaviest
sacrifices rather than be false to their affections. While her frame
shuddered, therefore, with the violence and abruptness of the emotions she
had endured, dawnings of the right gleamed upon her pure mind, and it was
not long before she was able to contemplate the truth with the steadiness
of principle, though it might, at the same time, have been with much of
the lingering weakness of humanity. When she lowered her hands, she looked
towards the mute and watchful Sigismund, with a smile that caused the
deadly paleness of her features to resemble a gleam of the sun lighting
upon a spotless peak of her native mountains.

"It would be vain to endeavor to conceal from thee, Sigismund," she said,
"that I could wish this were not so. I will confess even more--that when
the truth first broke upon me, thy repeated services, and, what is even
less pardonable, thy tried worth, were for an instant forgotten in the
reluctance I felt to admit that my fate could ever be united with one so
unhappily situated. There are moments when prejudices and habits are
stronger than reason; but their triumph is short in well-intentioned
minds. The terrible injustice of our laws have never struck me with such
force before, though last night, while those wretched travellers were so
eager for the blood of--of--?"

"My father, Adelheid."

"Of the author of thy being, Sigismund," she continued, with a solemnity
that proved to the young man how deeply she reverenced the tie, "I was
compelled to see that society might be cruelly unjust; but now I find its
laws and prohibitions visiting one like thee, so far from joining in its
oppression, my soul revolts against the wrong."

"Thanks--thanks--a thousand thanks!" returned the young man, fervently. "I
did not expect less than this from thee, Mademoiselle de Willading."

"If thou didst not expect more--far more, Sigismund," resumed the maiden,
her a