'But your dear Carl may not be dead. Heinrich is returning.'
Other times there were when she would not believe that he was dead, yet how many brave hearts were growing cold in death then all over Northern France! How many men yet were to perish among the blushing vineyards of Champagne, and under the beleaguered walls of Paris!
The cruel Blatt had only said he had been wounded. But how had he disappeared?
'He will return—oh, yet he will return! Kind God, you would not take him from me!'
And in the fervour of such a moment she would lift her streaming eyes upward with a trustful and angelic expression.
Like Charlie, when in many a comfortless bivouac under the sky and dew of heaven, under canvas when the summer rain pattered on the tent roof within an inch of his nose, of when in his bed tossing restlessly at the Chateau de Caillé, how many wild, strange, and impracticable plans and schemes did the busy mind of Ernestine frame, to reconstruct and hopelessly destroy again! Time, possibility, and the usages of life—and especially of her position in life, she overleaped with wonderful facility, so impulsive was she, but to fall back panting, as it were, and without one ray of hope, till she became, as we have said, like a stone, yet love lived on.
Times there were when she imagined, or strove to imagine, that she had eloped with Charlie; that he had cast epaulettes, sword, and military reputation to the winds, and all for her sake; and that she was rambling with him among those lovely woods and sylvan scenes he had so often described to her, the scenes of his native home in Warwick. They did not require a huge schloss; they could be so happy in a little cottage, and she was certain that she could milk a cow, if she tried.
Charlie she must and would see again at all hazards! Were they not each other's unto death—vowed in life and death? Even now where he was, she knew not, wist not; but in imagination she felt his arm pressing her hand to his side; she saw his brave and tender gaze of love into her eyes till they seemed to droop beneath the magnetism of it; she felt his kisses on their snowy lids, on her hair and on her brow, and all his soft uttered whispers come to memory again. And as she thought over all these things, the girl clasped her hot white hands in agony by day, and tossed feverishly and restlessly on her pillow by night.
At last Heinrich returned, to the increased joy of all and the thoughts of Ernestine went back to that evening when, from the terrace, she had watched Carl, driving in the britzka towards the Schloss—her Carl, then a stranger to her save by name, but who was now so dear! Heinrich looked well and strong, sun-browned and bold-eyed, and as the Count said, after kissing him on both cheeks, and giving him a kindly thwack on the back, 'not a whit the worse for his hanging!'
And now utterly regardless of what her parents might think or say, oblivious alike of their anger and their absurd pride, Ernestine, in her, usual passionate way, threw herself into her brother's arms, and cried in a piercing voice: