"Heaven forbid!" replied Konrad, clasping his hands; "hate thee, Anna? oh no!"
His eyes were full of the sweetness and ardour of the days of their first love, and Anna's filled with tears.
"I have long wished," she faltered, in a low and broken voice, while seating herself on the bench of one of those deeply-recessed windows near them—"I have long wished to see thee once more," she repeated, without raising her timid eyes, "to implore—not thy pardon, dear Konrad, for that I have no right to expect—but—but that thou wilt not remember me with bitterness"——
Konrad muttered something—he knew not what.
"I feel, Konrad, that I owe thee much for all I have made thee suffer; and I have now seen the worth and faith of thy heart when contrasted with mine own, and I blush for my weakness—my wickedness—my folly. Thou mayest deem this unwomanly—indelicate; but in love we are equal, and why may not one make reparation as the other—I as well as thou? I have lived, I say, to learn the value of the heart that loved me so well, and which, in a moment of frenzy—infatuation—O, dearest Konrad! call it what thou wilt—I forsook for another—another who betrayed me by a semblance of religious rites—oh! spare me the rest!" ....
"Anna," said Konrad, in a choking voice, as he rose to retire—but, instead, drew nearer to her; "though my eye may be hollow, my cheek pale, and my heart soured and saddened, its first sentiment for thee hath never altered. Anna—Anna, God knoweth that it hath not! For all thou hast made me endure for the past two years—from my heart—from my soul, I forgive thee, and I pray that thou mayest be happy. Anna—dearest Anna—I am going far away from the hills and woods of Bergen, to join the Lubeckers, or perhaps the Knights of Rhodes in their warfare in the distant East, for I have doomed myself to exile; but I still regard thee as I did, when we were in yon far isle of Westeray—as my sister—as my friend. As we first met in this old castle hall, when thou wert but a guileless girl and I a heedless boy, so shall we now part. All is forgotten—all is forgiven. And now—farewell; may the mother of God bless thee!"
He kissed her hand, and his tears fell upon it; he turned to leave the hall, but a giddiness came over him, and a film overspread his eyes.
He still felt the hand of Anna in his: another moment, and she sank upon his breast. All her love for him had returned; and all her womanly delicacy, and overweening pride, had given way before the more tender and generous impulses this sudden reunion with her early lover had called up within her.
"Oh, Konrad!" she whispered, while almost suffocated by her tears, "if my heart, though seared and saddened, is still prized by thee, it is thine, as in the days of our first love."
And, borne away by his passion, the forgiving Konrad pressed her close and closer to his breast. "And here," sayeth the Magister Absalom in his quaint papers, "here endeth the most important Boke in this our Historie."