ured up his
last thoughts of earth. She it was who healed the sick; she it was who
relieved the poor; and the superstition of that age brought pilgrims
from afar to the altars that she served.

Many years afterwards, a band of lawless robbers, who ever and anon
broke from their mountain fastnesses to pillage and to desolate the
valleys of the Rhine,--who spared neither sex nor age, neither tower
nor hut, nor even the houses of God Himself,--laid waste the territories
round Bornhofen, and demanded treasure from the convent. The abbess,
of the bold lineage of Rudesheim, refused the sacrilegious demand.
The convent was stormed; its vassals resisted; the robbers, inured to
slaughter, won the day; already the gates were forced, when a knight, at
the head of a small but hardy troop, rushed down from the mountain side
and turned the tide of the fray. Wherever his sword flashed fell a foe;
wherever his war-cry sounded was a space of dead men in the thick of
the battle. The fight was won, the convent saved; the abbess and the
sisterhood came forth to bless their deliverer. Laid under an aged oak,
he was bleeding fast to death; his head was bare and his locks were
gray, but scarcely yet with years. One only of the sisterhood recognized
that majestic face; one bathed his parched lips; one held his dying
hand; and in Leoline's presence passed away the faithful spirit of the
last lord of Liebenstein!

"Oh!" said Gertrude, through her tears; "surely you must have altered
the facts,--surely--surely--it must have been impossible for Leoline,
with a woman's heart, to have loved Otho more than Warbeck?"

"My child," said Vane, "so think women when they read a tale of love,
and see _the whole heart_ bared before them; but not so act they in real
life, when they see only the surface of character, and pierce not its
depths--until it is too late!"

CHAPTER XXV. THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.--A COMMON INCIDENT NOT BEFORE
DESCRIBED.--TREVYLYAN AND GERTRUDE.

THE day now grew cool as it waned to its decline, and the breeze came
sharp upon the delicate frame of the sufferer. They resolved to proceed
no farther; and as they carried with them attendants and baggage, which
rendered their route almost independent of the ordinary accommodation,
they steered for the opposite shore, and landed at a village beautifully
sequestered in a valley, and where they fortunately obtained a lodging
not often met with in the regions of the picturesque.