little Alwina. But he a little scoffed at the old-fashioned church
ceremonies which my father insisted on; and I fancy Fritz must have
taken some of his compliments as satire, for I saw certain signs of
manner by which I knew that my future husband, for all his civil words,
had irritated and annoyed my brother. But all the money arrangements
were liberal in the extreme, and more than satisfied, almost surprised,
my father. Even Fritz lifted up his eyebrows and whistled. I alone did
not care about anything. I was bewitched,--in a dream,--a kind of
despair. I had got into a net through my own timidity and weakness, and
I did not see how to get out of it. I clung to my own home-people that
fortnight as I had never done before. Their voices, their ways were all
so pleasant and familiar to me, after the constraint in which I had
been living. I might speak and do as I liked without being corrected
by Madame Rupprecht, or reproved in a delicate, complimentary way by
Monsieur de la Tourelle. One day I said to my father that I did not want
to be married, that I would rather go back to the dear old mill; but he
seemed to feel this speech of mine as a dereliction of duty as great as
if I had committed perjury; as if, after the ceremony of betrothal, no
one had any right over me but my future husband. And yet he asked me
some solemn questions; but my answers were not such as to do me any
good.

"Dost thou know any fault or crime in this man that should prevent God's
blessing from resting on thy marriage with him? Dost thou feel aversion
or repugnance to him in any way?"

And to all this what could I say? I could only stammer out that I
did not think I loved him enough; and my poor old father saw in this
reluctance only the fancy of a silly girl who did not know her own mind,
but who had now gone too far to recede.

So we were married, in the Court chapel, a privilege which Madame
Rupprecht had used no end of efforts to obtain for us, and which she
must have thought was to secure us all possible happiness, both at the
time and in recollection afterwards.

We were married; and after two days spent in festivity at Carlsruhe,
among all our new fashionable friends there, I bade good-by for ever
to my dear old father. I had begged my husband to take me by way of
Heidelberg to his old castle in the Vosges; but I found an amount of
determination, under that effeminate appearance and manner, for which I
was not prepared, and he refused