angry Marie, as she pushed
away the helping hand.

"Dearest Marie, have I deserved this of you?" said Bertha, gently, and
with tenderness. "Oh, if you but knew how unhappy I am, you would not
be so harsh with me."

"Unhappy, indeed!" loudly laughed the other, "unhappy! because the
courteous knight only danced with you once, I suppose."

"You are very hard, Marie," replied Bertha; "you are angry with me, and
will not even tell me the cause of your displeasure."

"Really! so you do not know how you have deceived me? but you cannot
keep your duplicity a secret any longer, which has subjected me to
scorn and confusion. I never could have thought you would have acted so
ungenerously, so falsely by me!"

The wounded feeling of being out-done by her cousin, and as she
thought, despised by Sturmfeder, was again awakened in Marie's mind;
her tears flowed, she laid her heated forehead in her hand, and her
rich locks fell over and hid her face.

Tears are the symptoms of gentle suffering, they say: Bertha had
experienced it, and continued her conversation with confidence. "Marie!
you have accused me of keeping a secret from you. I see you have
discovered that, which I never could have divulged. Put yourself in my
situation--ah! you yourself, cheerful and frank as you are, would never
have confided to me your inmost secret. But I will conceal it no
longer--you have guessed what my lips shunned to express. I love him!
Yes, and my love is returned. This mutual feeling dates much further
back than yesterday. Will you hear me? and I will tell you all."

Marie's tears still flowed on. She made no answer to Bertha's last
question, who now related to her the way in which they became
acquainted with each other in the house of her good aunt in Tuebingen;
how she liked him, long before he acknowledged his love of her; and
narrated many endearing recollections of the past--the happy moments
they had spent together, their oath of fidelity at their separation.
"And now," she continued, with a painful smile, "he has been induced to
join the League in this unhappy war, because we were in Ulm, thinking,
very naturally, that my father was embarked in the same cause. He hopes
to render himself worthy of me by the aid of his sword; for he is poor,
very poor. Oh! Marie, you know my father--how good he is, but also how
stern, when any thing runs counter to his opinion. Would he give his
daughter to a man who has drawn his sword against Wuertem