A few seconds after Cordula welcomed her father, who had anxiously ridden
forth to meet his jewel.




CHAPTER XIV.

"I can hardly do more, and yet I must," groaned Frau Christine, as she
gazed after the torch-bearers who preceded Cordula. Her husband,
however, tried to detain her, offering to go to their young guest in her
place.

But the effort was vain. The motherless child, whom the captive father
probably believed to be in safety with her sensible sister, was at a post
of danger, and only a woman's eye could judge whether it would do to
yield to Eva's wish, which the housekeeper had just told her mistress,
and allow her--it was already past midnight-to remain longer at the
hospital.

She would not have hesitated to require her niece's return home had not
maternal solicitude urged her to deprive her of nothing which could aid
her troubled soul to regain its poise. If possible at all, it would be
through devotion to an arduous work of charity that she would understand
her own nature, and find an answer to the question whether, when the
slanderers were silenced, she would take the veil or cling firmly to the
hopeless love which had mastered her young heart.

If she succeeded in remaining steadfast here and, in spite of the glad
consciousness of having conquered by the sign of the cross, was still