'May God protect you, my dearest Gustav!' exclaimed my cousin. 'But how can you have the heart to frighten me with such threats? Am I not wretched enough? Would you increase the burden that is weighing me down to the grave? I see nothing before me but misery and despair; no comfort--no escape.' Poor Jettè was weeping; I could hear how she sobbed in her woe. I now perceived why the poor girl had been so pale and distant--I was betrothed to her.
'Forgive me, dearest girl! I hardly know what I am saying; but take comfort, do not weep so bitterly. Heaven will not desert us, and we shall find some means of softening your father; besides, no rational man would wish to obtain a wife upon compulsion. If he has the least pride or spirit, he will himself draw back.'
'Ah, Gustav! if there were any chance of his drawing back, he would not have come here. His father wrote that he was coming expressly to claim his--his promised rights; and that--and that we should learn to know each other before the wedding. We had been betrothed for eleven years, he wrote, and it was time that ... No! I cannot think of it without despair.'
'What sort of looking person is he? Is he handsome? Whom does he resemble?'
'He is not in the least like what he was as a boy, he is very much changed; he has improved very much in looks, and, indeed, may be called handsome now.'
'That is a girl with a good taste,' thought I; 'I wish I could help her out of her troubles.'
'Handsome!--I congratulate you, Miss Jettè--handsome people generally make a favourable impression, and by degrees one becomes quite reconciled to them, and pleased with them--don't you think so?'
The lover grasped the branch nearest him so roughly in his anger, that he made the whole tree shake.
'Gustav! are you in earnest?' exclaimed Jettè, in a tone of voice that would have gone to the heart of a stone, if stones had hearts.
'Dearest, dearest Jettè! Sweet, patient angel!' He stretched himself so far out from the tree that I think he must have reached her hand and kissed it.