Chapter 11 - Page 2

it most became her to
pursue. But, as has been seen, it was long before she could summon the
self-command to request what she now saw was doubly necessary, another
meeting with her lover. As both had thought of nothing but his last words
during the short separation, there appeared no abruptness in the manner in
which he resumed the discourse, on seating himself at her side, exactly as
if they had not parted at all.

"The secret has been torn from me, Adelheid. The headsman of the canton is
my father; were the fact publicly known, the heartless and obdurate laws
would compel me to be his successor. He has no other child, except a
gentle girl--one innocent and kind as thou."

Adelheid covered her face with both her hands, as if to shut out a view of
the horrible truth. Perhaps an instinctive reluctance to permit her
companion to discover how great a blow had been given by this avowal of
his birth, had also its influence in producing the movement. They who have
passed the period of youth, and who can recall those days of inexperience
and hope, when the affections are fresh and the heart is untainted with
too much communion with the world,--and, especially, they who know of what
a delicate compound of the imaginative and the real the master-passion is
formed, how sensitively it regards all that can reflect credit on the
beloved object, and with what ingenuity it endeavors to find plausible
excuses for every blot that may happen, either by accident or demerit, to
tarnish the lustre of a picture that fancy has so largely aided in
drawing, will understand the rude nature of the shock that she had
received. But Adelheid de Willading, though a woman in the liveliness and
fervor of her imagination, as well as in the proneness to conceive her own
ingenuous conceptions to be more founded in reality than a sterner view of
things might possibly have warranted, was a woman also in the more
generous qualities of the heart, and in those enduring principles, which
seem to have predisposed the better part of the sex to make the heaviest
sacrifices rather than be false to their affections. While her frame
shuddered, therefore, with the violence and abruptness of the emotions she
had endured, dawnings of the right gleamed upon her pure mind, and it was
not long before she was able to contemplate the truth with the steadiness
of principle, though it might, at the same time, have been with much of
the lingering weakness of humanity. When she lowered her hands, she looked
towards the mute and watchful Sigismund, with a smile that caused the
deadly paleness of her features to resemble a gleam of the sun lighting
upon a spotless peak of her native mountains.

"It would be vain to endeavor to conceal from thee,