rt?

"Linda, I have been expecting you to come down to me," said her aunt,
gravely.

"Yes, aunt Charlotte, and I was coming."

"It is late now, Linda."

"Then, if you please, I will go to bed," said Linda, who was by no
means sorry to escape the necessity of returning to the parlour.

"I could not go to my rest," said Madame Staubach, "without doing my
duty by seeing you and telling you again, that it is very wicked of
you to leave the room whenever our friend enters it. Linda, do you
ever think of the punishment which pride will bring down upon you?"

"It is not pride."

"Yes, Linda. It is the worst pride in the world."

"I will sit with him all the evening if he will promise me never
again to ask me to be his wife."

"The time will perhaps come, Linda, when you will be only too glad to
take him, and he will tell you that you are not fit to be the wife of
an honest man." Then, having uttered this bitter curse,--for such it
was,--Madame Staubach went across to her own room.

Linda, as she knelt at her bedside, tried to pray that she might
be delivered from temptation, but she felt that her prayers were
not prayers indeed. Even when she was on her knees, with her hands
clasped together as though towards her God, her very soul was full
of the presence of that arm which had been so fast wound round her
waist. And when she was in bed she gave herself up to the sweetness
of her love. With what delicious violence had that storm of kisses
fallen on her! Then she prayed for him, and strove very hard that her
prayer might be sincere.

CHAPTER VII

Another month had passed by, and it was now nearly mid-winter.
Another month had passed by, and neither had Madame Staubach nor
Peter Steinmarc heard ought of Ludovic's presence among the rafters;
but things were much altered in the red house, and Linda's life was
hot, fevered, suspicious, and full of a dangerous excitement. Twice
again she had seen Ludovic, once meeting him in the kitchen, and once
she had met him at a certain dark gate in the Nonnen Garten, to which
she had contrived to make her escape for half an hour on a false
plea. Things were much changed with Linda Tressel when she could
condescend to do this. And she had received from her lover a dozen
notes, always by the hand of Tetchen, and had written to him more
than once a few short, incoherent, startling words, in which she
would protest that she loved him, and protest also at the same time
that