"Then, if you please, I will go to bed," said Linda, who was by no means sorry to escape the necessity of returning to the parlour.
"I could not go to my rest," said Madame Staubach, "without doing my duty by seeing you and telling you again, that it is very wicked of you to leave the room whenever our friend enters it. Linda, do you ever think of the punishment which pride will bring down upon you?"
"It is not pride."
"Yes, Linda. It is the worst pride in the world."
"I will sit with him all the evening if he will promise me never again to ask me to be his wife."
"The time will perhaps come, Linda, when you will be only too glad to take him, and he will tell you that you are not fit to be the wife of an honest man." Then, having uttered this bitter curse,—for such it was,—Madame Staubach went across to her own room.
Linda, as she knelt at her bedside, tried to pray that she might be delivered from temptation, but she felt that her prayers were not prayers indeed. Even when she was on her knees, with her hands clasped together as though towards her God, her very soul was full of the presence of that arm which had been so fast wound round her waist. And when she was in bed she gave herself up to the sweetness of her love. With what delicious violence had that storm of kisses fallen on her! Then she prayed for him, and strove very hard that her prayer might be sincere.
CHAPTER VII
Another month had passed by, and it was now nearly mid-winter. Another month had passed by, and neither had Madame Staubach nor Peter Steinmarc heard ought of Ludovic's presence among the rafters; but things were much altered in the red house, and Linda's life was hot, fevered, suspicious, and full of a dangerous excitement. Twice again she had seen Ludovic, once meeting him in the kitchen, and once she had met him at a certain dark gate in the Nonnen Garten, to which she had contrived to make her escape for half an hour on a false plea. Things were much changed with Linda Tressel when she could condescend to do this. And she had received from her lover a dozen notes, always by the hand of Tetchen, and had written to him more than once a few short, incoherent, startling words, in which she would protest that she loved him, and protest also at the same time that her love must be all in vain. "It is of no use. Do not write, and pray do not come. If this goes on it will kill me. You know that I shall never give myself to anybody else." This was in answer to a proposition made through Tetchen that he should come again to her,—should come, and take her away with him. He had come, and there had been that interview in the kitchen, but he had not succeeded in inducing her to leave her home.