The expression of her face changed at times; its softness seemed to pass away, and then contempt and anger mingled with sorrow on her white lips. She was a spirited yet a gentle girl; she felt that she had been insulted, and treated like a child; that her natural freedom had been trampled on, her wishes ignored, and in the long waking hours of the silent night, when no sound was heard but the hooting of the owls in the ruined tower close by, she brooded, almost revengefully, upon the pride and tyranny of her parents, and the gross insolence—for such she justly deemed it—of the Baron Grünthal, seeking her hand without her affection—her hand in defiance of herself and her avowed love for another!
Then it was, in times such as these, that wild and impotent schemes of flight and freedom occurred—schemes from which she shrank when daylight came.
Ernestine looked ere long careworn and became ill; her physician recommended the baths at different places, and the mineral waters elsewhere; but they were resorted to in vain. One little enclosure from Carl, received secretly in the letters of Herminia, was worth all the baths and wells in Germany to Ernestine.
One evening Baron Rhineberg came galloping to the Schloss, and from his vast rotundity was ushered into the drawing-room when on the verge of an apoplectic fit. His features were purple, his eyes rolled wildly in their sockets, and from mingled excitement and enthusiasm, the burly old Teuton could only splutter and utter some incoherent sounds, while the Spitz pug barked furiously.
'Ach Gott!' exclaimed the Count; 'what is the matter?'
'Have you not heard the news, Herr Count?' he gasped.
'News!' repeated Frankenburg, changing colour, and mechanically, or by use and wont, playing with the pipe that dangled at his button, for even he did not smoke in the drawing-room, though a thorough German.
'But of course you could not, for I have just come from the city,' said Rhineberg.
'Der Teufel!' said Frankenburg, angrily, 'and what may the news be?'
'The advanced column of the German army has come to blows with the French at last.'