ned by
me, and leave off. If she were forced into a marriage with you, you
would only disgrace yourself. I don't suppose you want to see her
dead at your feet. Go on now, and think of what I have said to you."
So Ludovic had been with her again! No; he, Peter Steinmarc, would
not wed with one who was so abandoned. He would reject her;--would
reject her that very night. But he would do so in a manner that
should leave her very little cause for joy or triumph.

We must now go back for a while to Linda and her aunt. No detailed
account of that meeting between Linda and Steinmarc, in Steinmarc's
room, ever reached Madame Staubach's ears. That there had been an
interview, and that Linda had asked Steinmarc to absolve her from her
troth, the aunt did learn from the niece; and most angry she was when
she learned it. She again pointed out to the sinner the terrible sin
of which she was guilty in not submitting herself entirely, in not
eradicating and casting out from her bosom all her human feelings,
in not crushing herself, as it were, upon a wheel, in token of her
repentance for what she had done. Sackcloth and ashes, in their
material shape, were odious to the imagination of Madame Staubach,
because they had a savour of Papacy, and implied that the poor sinner
who bore them could do something towards his own salvation by his own
works; but that moral sackcloth, and those ashes of the heart and
mind, which she was ever prescribing to Linda, seemed to her to have
none of this taint. And yet, in what is the difference? The school of
religion to which Madame Staubach belonged was very like that early
school of the Church of Rome in which material ashes were first used
for the personal annoyance of the sinner. But the Church of Rome in
Madame Staubach's day had, by the force of the human nature of its
adherents, made its way back to the natural sympathies of mankind;
whereas in Madame Staubach's school the austerity of self-punishment
was still believed to be all in all. During the days of Steinmarc's
meditation, Linda was prayed for and was preached to with an
unflagging diligence which, at the end of that time, had almost
brought the girl to madness. For Linda the worst circumstance of all
was this, that she had never as yet brought herself to disbelieve her
aunt's religious menaces. She had been so educated that what fixed
belief she had on the subject at all was in accordance with her
aunt's creed rather than against it. Whe