"The stranger knight was in fact returning to Spain, and Clara proposed setting out in his company; while Ida, who found it impossible to part from her friend, resolved to accompany her in knightly costume.
"My most urgent expostulations were in vain, and I was at last obliged to yield to their united entreaties. My brother's infant son was consigned to the protection of a convent. They took their departure, and, full of foreboding, my weeping eye followed them.
"How I burned with desire to accompany them! but I was entangled in a feud, in which I had promised a friend my succour, and my pledged word bound me to Germany. Ah! in an ill-fated hour they departed; I never beheld them more.
"From that moment begins the dark period of my life. I was successful in the feud. Oh, that I had fallen beneath the sword of an enemy, to have escaped long years of torture, and the frightful hours in which I first—oh, forgive me these tears! they still often flow at the remembrance of Ida and my brother: age cannot so blunt our sympathies that pain may not sometimes return with new force to our bosoms.
"On their journey Ida was seized with the unhappy fancy of not discovering herself to my brother till they all should have reached their native country again, in order that she might then surprise him the more joyfully as my bride. They arrived in Spain, and sent the required sum to Tunis. The prisoner was liberated; on the wings of affection he hastened over the sea, and forgot on Clara's bosom, in one moment of rapture, the sufferings which he had endured for years.
"Ida was soon presented to him as a friend; he received her kindly, and enjoyed for some days in the society of his spouse that happiness which he had so long been deprived of. But his eyes were soon rivetted on Ida: he observed the tender connexion subsisting between her and his wife, and suspicion kindled in his soul. 'She is untrue to me,' cried he when alone; 'she divides her heart between me and this hateful stranger!'
"He now watched them both more closely than before, and soon thought his suspicions justified; he thought he could discover a tenderness which neither of them even took pains to conceal. By degrees he became colder towards his wife, hiding the wound she had inflicted; whilst she on her part, unconstrainedly and without the shadow of fear, shared her affections with her consort and her friend.
"Jealousy raged in my brother's bosom; he began to hate Clara and her companion; he imputed a significancy to every look and every gesture; the rancour within him robbed him of his sleep, or suspicion appalled him in hideous dreams.
"'For this, then, I came across the sea,' said he to himself; 'these are the joys of meeting; these, then, are the delights of my love. I am come to be the prey of racking torture. I find my home again at the side of a faithless wife, and she herself meets me only that she may the earlier proclaim to me her effrontery and her broken vows.'
"He made an old squire the confidant of his chagrin: both now watched the two friends with an indefatigable vigilance; they beheld a thousand proofs of the supposed infidelity, without in the least conjecturing the true posture of affairs; my brother's fury rose more and more, and a dark resolve at last began to ripen in his breast.