circumstances could have been that
of strangers, and their mutual knowledge came as an assistant to break
down the barriers of those forms which were so irksome to their longings
for a freer interchange of feeling and thought. Adelheid possessed too
much intellectual tact to have recourse to the every-day language of
consolation. When she did speak, which, as became her superior rank and
less embarrassed situation, she was the first to do, it in general but
friendly allusions.

"Thou wilt go with us to Italy, in the morning," she said, drying her
eyes; "my father quits Blonay, in company with the Signor Grimaldi, with
to-morrow's sun, and thou wilt be of our company?"

"Where thou wilt--anywhere with thee--anywhere to hide my shame!"

The blood mounted to the temples of Adelheid; her air even appeared
imposing to the eyes of the artless and unpractised Christine, as she
answered--

"Shame is a word that applies to the mean and mercenary, to the vile and
unfaithful," she said, with womanly and virtuous indignation; "but not to
thee, love."

"O! do not, do not condemn him;" whispered Christine, covering her face
with her hands. "He has found himself unequal to bearing the burthen of
our degradation, and he should be spoken of in pity rather than with
hatred."

Adelheid was silent; but she regarded the poor trembling girl, whose head
now nestled in her bosom, with melancholy concern.

"Didst thou know him well?" she asked in a low tone, following rather the
chain of her own thoughts, than reflecting on the nature of the question
she put. "I had hoped that this refusal would bring no other pain than the
unavoidable mortification which I fear belongs to the weakness of our sex
and our habits."

"Thou knowest not how dear preference is to the despised!--how cherished
the thought of being loved becomes to those, who, out of their own narrow
limits of natural friends, have been accustomed to meet only with contempt
and aversion! Thou hast always been known, and courted, and happy! Thou
canst not know how dear it is to the despised to seem even to be
preferred!"

"Nay, say not this, I pray thee!" answered Adelheid, hurriedly, and with a
throb of anguish at her heart; "there is little in this life that speaks
fairly for itself. We are not always what we seem; and if we were, and far
more miserable than anything but vice can make us, there is another state
of being, in which justice--pure, unalloyed justice--will be do