is heart was once given to
another."

"Will you listen to me?" asked the countess; and, seeing Elise still
lost in silent reverie, she continued: "I will relate to you the
history of Feodor von Brenda, and his unhappy, forsaken bride." Elise
shuddered, and cast a wandering, despairing look around.

"Will you listen to me?" repeated the countess.

"Speak--I am listening," whispered Elise, languidly. And then, the
Countess Lodoiska von Sandomir, often interrupted by Elise's plaintive
sighs, her outbursts of heartfelt sympathy, related to the young girl
the sad and painful story of her love and her betrayal.

She was a young girl, scarcely sixteen, the daughter of a prince,
impoverished by his own fault and prodigality, when she became the
victim of her father's avarice. Without compassion for her tears, her
timid youth, he had sold her for a million. With the cruel selfishness
of a spendthrift miser, he had sold his young, fresh, beautiful
daughter for dead, shining metal, to a man of sixty years, fit to be
her grandfather, and who persecuted the innocent girl with the ardent
passion of a stripling. She had been dragged to the altar, and the
priest had been deaf to the "No!" she had uttered, when falling
unconscious at his feet. Thus she had become the wife of the rich
Count Sandomir--a miserable woman who stood, amidst the splendor of
life, without hope, without joy, as in a desert.

But one day this desert had changed, and spring bloomed in her soul,
for love had come to warm her chilled heart with the sunbeam of
happiness. She did not reproach herself, nor did she feel any scruples
of conscience, that it was not her husband whom she loved. What
respect could she have for marriage, when for her it had been only a
matter of sale and purchase? She had been traded off like a slave, and
with happy exultation she said to herself, "Love has come to make me
free, and, as a free and happy woman, I will tear this contract
by which I have been sold." And she had torn it. She had had no
compassion on the gray hairs and devoted heart of her noble husband.
She had been sacrificed, and now pitilessly did she sacrifice her
husband to her lover. She saw but one duty before her--to reward the
love of the man she adored with boundless devotion. No concealment, no
disguise would she allow. Any attempt at equivocation she regarded as
an act of treason to the great and holy feeling which possessed her
whole soul.

Usually all the wo