sedan-chair was there, for she felt that her feet would scarcely carry
her back. I ordered one to be prepared for Jungfrau Ortlieb, though I
remembered the dying woman who kept her. As if the matter were some easy
task, she begged the countess to excuse her, and remained beside the
wretched straw pallet."

The deeply agitated girl had just released herself from the matron's
embrace, and begged the knight to have her Roland saddled; but Frau
Christine stopped him, and entreated Cordula, for her sake, to use her
sedan-chair instead of the horse.

"If it will gratify you," replied the countess smiling; "but I should
reach home safely on the piebald."

"Who doubts it?" asked the matron. "Give her your arm, husband. The
bearers are ready, and you will soon overtake them on your horse,
Boemund."

"The walk through the warm June night will do me good," the latter
protested.

Soon after the sedan-chair which conveyed Cordula, lighted by several
torch-bearers on foot and on horseback, began to move towards the city.

At St. Linhard, Boemund Altrosen, who walked beside it, asked the
question, "Then I may hope, Countess? I really may?"

She nodded affectionately, and answered under her breath: "You may; but
we must first try whether the flower of love which blossomed for you out
of my weakness is the real one. I believe it will be."

He joyously raised her hand to his lips, but a torch-bearer's
shout--"Count von Montfort and his train!"--urged him back from the
sedan chair. A few seconds after Cordula welcomed her father, who had
anxiously ridden forth to meet his jewel.

CHAPTER XIV.

"I can hardly do more, and yet I must," groaned Frau Christine, as
she gazed after the torch-bearers who preceded Cordula. Her husband,
however, tried to detain her, offering to go to their young guest in her
place.

But the effort was vain. The motherless child, whom the captive father
probably believed to be in safety with her sensible sister, was at a
post of danger, and only a woman's eye could judge whether it would
do to yield to Eva's wish, which the housekeeper had just told her
mistress, and allow her--it was already past midnight-to remain longer
at the hospital.

She would not have hesitated to require her niece's return home had not
maternal solicitude urged her to deprive her of nothing which could aid
her troubled soul to regain its poise. If possible at all, it would be
through devotion to an arduous work of cha