y
father's heart forever. May God forgive the sins that love causes me
to commit!"

But when this note had been sent, when she knew that her lover had
received it, and that her decision was irrevocable, she was seized
with trembling faintness, with the oppression of conscious guilt; and
it seemed to her as if a new spring of love had suddenly burst forth
in her heart, and as if she had never loved her father so sincerely,
so devotedly, so tenderly, as now that she was on the point of leaving
him.

But it was too late to draw back; for in the mean, time she had
received a second letter from Feodor, imparting the details of a plan
for their joint flight, and she had approved of this plan.

Every thing was prepared, and all that she had to do was to remain
in her room, and await the concerted signal with which Feodor was to
summon her.

As soon as she heard this signal she was to leave the house with her
maid, who had determined to accompany her, come out into the street,
where Feodor would be in waiting with his carriage, and drive in the
first place to the church. There a priest, heavily bribed, would meet
them, and, with the blessing of the Church, justify Feodor in carrying
his young wife out into the world, and Elise in "leaving father and
home, and clinging only unto her husband."

Some hours were yet wanting to the appointed time. Elise, condemned to
the idleness of waiting, experienced all the anxiety and pains which
the expectation of the decisive moment usually carries with it.

With painful desire she thought of her father, and, although she
repeated to herself that he would not miss her, that her absence
would not be noticed, yet her excited imagination kept painting to
her melancholy fancy, pictures of his astonishment, his anxiety, his
painful search after her.

She seemed, for the first time, to remember that she was about to
leave him, without having been reconciled to him; that she was to part
from him forever, without having begged his forgiveness, without even
having felt his fatherly kiss on her brow. At least she would write to
him, at least send him one loving word of farewell. This determination
she now carried out, and poured out all her love, her suffering, her
suppressed tenderness, the reproaches of her conscience, in burning
and eloquent words, on the paper which she offered to her father as
the olive-branch of peace.

When she had written this letter, she folded it, and hid it carefu