“But, Dora, I will give you time, and perhaps you can learn to love me as something nearer. Oh, if you will try,” pleaded the disappointed man.
“My poor friend, it can never, never be. It is an utter impossibility!” she replied, weeping bitterly. After a few moments spent in deep thought, she continued:
“Listen, Mr. Weimher, and I will tell you a secret. No one knows it. It is a story of the past, and I tell it to you to prove to you how hopeless it is for you to love me. My friend, I may trust you? You will not betray me?”
“Can you ask? You have but to command me, and I obey, even to the yielding up of life itself.”
She sighed deeply. It pained her to know of such rare devotion, when she had nothing to give in return. Bending toward him, she whispered:
“I love another. I am already married!”
“Good heavens!” he exclaimed, leaning trembling and aghast against the railing of the balcony.
“It is even so,” she returned, sadly. “But I doubt if I should even know my own husband should I meet him now.”
She then related to him the story of her youthful marriage, with which the reader is already acquainted; while Fredrich Weimher listened, spell-bound, to the thrilling and startling events which had transpired to bind for life one so young, beautiful, and good.
There was a look of hope in his eyes again when she had finished, and he said, eagerly: