hope. Bad as the present was, if she attempted to look to the future she saw something worse. She had exiled herself by her own act from the sympathy of the good, and the bad man was no longer there with his insidious influence to quiet the reproaches of conscience; he was gone, with a coward's fear in his heart and a coward's lie on his tongue. Her brother was estranged; her father turned on her his cold eyes, and maintained, after his first burst of passion was over, a rigid silence. He desired her to drive out with him in an open carriage, in order that society might see that she was not yet quite discarded; but he handed her in and out of the carriage with a touch and look that froze her heart.

She was conscious of the depth of her disgrace. She saw clearly what she might have been, and she knew what she was. Self-contemplation was the habit of her mind, and this introspection now sumed a character of unalterable gloom. The remorse which follows detection, and shrouds the

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thought in sickness, is an agony that bears with it none of the grace of repentance: not turning to the promise of amendment and a better life; not seeking mercy through the ways of virtuous submission, not directing the perplexed spirit to the track of duty, not inviting to a holy progress with the voice of sweet religion, but accusing and condemning. Under its jurisdiction Dorothea saw nothing else than despair. Her whole faculties and her whole life seemed given to her merely for the intense appreciation of that one word; and her imagination, ruminating its bitter food, became diseased. She believed that she was a soul in hell, undergoing the punishment of eternity. Thus the use of prayer was shut out from her; and after a long hour of supplicating cries, which the passion of her affliction poured out before the image of the crucified Saviour (a figure sculptured in alabaster, which she had, under the influence of a growing superstition, suspended in her chamber within the last month), she rose from her knees in a worse agony, believing

that she had passed beyond the pale of hope, and forcibly pulled down the idol she had raised and flung it across the room, and saw it split in fragments against the hard wall. This destruction, the work of her own hands, brought desolation; by the breaking of this image she lost the only shape of mercy present to her heart, and she sat in a sullen lethargy staring at the ruin she had made.

Her maid Caroline brought her, by the direction of Doctor Enghel, many delicacies to tempt her appetite, but they were pushed away; and the presence of the kind-hearted girl, who lingered in the doorway looking on her mistress with the longing to alleviate her pain, was not even noticed. But for Caroline's presence another was presently substituted; another step approached, another eye was turned upon her. Ida stood by Dorothea, with her hand resting on the back of the chair which she occupied, and viewed with her those ruined fragments upon which her anguish was for the moment concentrated. Dorothea became aware of some other existence in the room, and looked up. At the first sight the ungenerous thought suggested itself that Ida was sent to add reproof to her misery, and she turned from her, but Ida stooped over her, looked kindly in her face, and took hold of her hand.

Dorothea, will you not speak to me? The Countess drew her hand away, shuddered, and averted her face. Ida knelt by her side and murmured low

'Do not turn away from me. I am sorry for you; speak to me.' No reply came and Ida went on-' Do not make me feel my coming an intrusion. I hoped you might like to see me. I know how you are suffering; and I wish I could help you. I have felt myself how sharp it is to suffer and to do wrong. I am not happy ;-no, Dorothea, I know well what pain is, and I can feel for yours. Speak to me, or at least look at me.'

Dorothea looked round her, but doubtfully, and with an expression of fear.

'Dorothea,' said Ida (in answer to that look), 'you frighten me; you are as white as that broken alabaster. Why do you sit so still, staring at it; and who destroyed the figure?'

'I did!' answered Dorothea, breaking her long silence with a startling cry; 'I did. I tell you I tore it down from the wall and threw it from me, and shattered it all to bits, because my prayer for peace was not and could not be answered. Oh! the last the last is gone: the only friend of my terrible, of my eternal solitude.'

A deep compassion moved Ida, so that she almost feared to speak, for she knew that speech, though kindly meant, too often aggravates the misery it is addressed to. Dorothea felt the virtue of her silence; her better nature was touched; and, placing on the table beside her the severed pieces of the Redeemer's image, she wept for awhile in tranquil grief and then moved towards Ida and linked her arms round her, and kissed her repeatedly, and with increasing emotion. Her trouble now flowed rapidly in words

'Oh, Ida! hear what I have thought, what I have believed. I tell you it seemed to me that I was judged and lost; that prayer, that hope, that God was shut out from me. You see then, you understand what I thought. I thought I was in hell. Do not, Ida, do not look startled; do not hide your face, for by seeing it I take comfort. Ida, Ida! I have not forgotten it. You tried to save me long ago; and I rejected you. You alone spoke the merciful words of warning, and now you come (though I would not then listen to you), with your dear face and voice-now you come to me, and I feel there may be still something like love left for me ;no, not love, for the poisonous word has sucked my life, my soul away; and I dare not ever speak it again-but kindness: I think I see kindness in you.

'Listen, and do not interrupt me. I have a fear, a fear worse than all the rest, growing in my mind. Let me tell it now while I can, and answer

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me with the truth, if you know it. This fear, I say, this fear is Florian Geier. Why do you shake your head? Why is your face clouded? Can you not feel for such fear? I tell you I know my father, and because I know him, and because of some words he spoke in his fit of passion (oh, Ida, how he has frightened me, and how cruel he can be), I believe that he will press a marriage-a marriage so horrible to my imagination, that the pains of death, and of hell after death, could show me nothing worse; for I hate that man. Yes, I say hate; hate him for my own blind folly when I thought I loved him; hate him for the pangs 1 have endured; despise him for being deceived. His drawling voice, his creeping step, the smell of smoke that hangs about him, oh, I shudder at it all! Yes, I shudder when I think of him?

'Silence, Dorothea, lest your words should be an offence to God. Be quiet; and if you can, be just. Hatred is a great sin, and you have no need for fear. This man is gone for ever.'

A change came over Dorothea's aspect, and she laid hold of Ida with shivering hands while she questioned.

'How do you mean gone for ever? but she dared not put the word that she heard sounding in her heart-dead. How is he gone?'

'Why, so that he will not come back. I have seen him; he is determined, and he has said so to your father. His mind is well made up.'

"Ah! cried Dorothea, wringing her hands, I see, I see; I understand you now too well. I have, then, been offered to him by my father, my cold, cruel father, and I have been rejected, cast off, disregarded, despised, reviled, and by the slave that worshipped me. I cannot live and think it.'

'Stop, Dorothea, it is not so. Florian Geier has neither reviled nor despised you; and if I have sometimes wondered at the admiration you once expressed for him, and at the enthusiasm you once felt, let me tell you that the noble

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thoughts I have found in his heart have justified it now. Before he left Badheim he came to see me; he came with such a sorry, blank face, with such a sad, slow step, his eyes were so red and swollen, that my spirits sank when I looked at him. But he wished to speak to me, and it was on your account. He wished me to go to you, to remain always your friend, to tell you that he should cherish the recollection of his first meeting with you, and not of this terrible parting. He thought how much you must suffer, and he was anxious that you should be comforted.'

'Oh, say no more,' cried Dorothea; I cannot bear a word more. I tell you, leave me alone.'

Ida finding this poor creature so unable at present to endure the voice of truth, and so difficult to cope with, might have been disposed to comply with this request, but for an incident which awakened fresh feelings of pity. The servant Caroline entered the room with a parcel, which was addressed to Dorothea; and when it was opened, it was found to contain a collection of small notes, addressed by her on many different occasions to Potolski. A few lines from Ernest accompanied the parcel, and these were given to Ida to read. They ran

thus:

'The man whose name I will neither write nor speak, has forwarded to me to-day this parcel of letters. I send them to you in a sealed packet as they came to me, in order that you may know positively that I have not broken the seal, and that you may with your own hands destroy them.

'ERNEST WERTHEIM.'

It was impossible to withhold compassion from the condition to which this culmination of cruelty and treachery on the part of the Pole reduced Dorothea. It was, no doubt, his malignant desire to afflict Count Ernest that impelled him to the act. He was incapable of understanding the Count's character, and did not suppose it possible that he would forbear from reading what his sister had written. Ida's heart swelled in indig