It was not till many years afterwards that he stood by her grave,
still with no softening of the cruel picture driven then as with fire
into his soul; her affection, her confidence in him still contending
with the suspicions, the ill-concealed [131] antipathy to him of her
hostile brothers, the distress of her flight, half in dread to find
the husband she was pursuing with the wildness of some lost child,
who seeking its parents begins to suspect treacherous abandonment.
That most mortifying view of his actions had doubtless been further
enforced on her by others, the worst possible reading, to her own
final discomfiture, of a not unfaithful heart.
NOTES
128. *Sunday, August 24, Feast of St. Bartholomew.
VII. THE LOWER PANTHEISM
Jetzo, da ich ausgewachsen,
Viel gelesen, viel gereist,
Schwillt mein Herz, und ganz von Herzen,
Glaub' ich an den Heilgen Geist.--HEINE.+
[132] Those who were curious to trace the symmetries of chance or
destiny felt now quite secure in observing that, of nine French kings
of the name, every third Charles had been a madman.
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