“Return to you?” asked she, breathlessly.  “Be yours again?  He was then once yours?”

“I yielded to him what is most sacred in life, and yet you ask if he was mine!” said the countess, smiling sadly.

Elise uttered a loud, piercing shriek, and covered her face with her hands.  Her emotion was so expressive and painful that it touched the heart even of her rival.  Almost lovingly she passed her arm around Elise’s waist and drew her down gently to her on the sofa.  “Come,” said she, “let us sit by each other like two sisters.  Come, and listen to me.  I will disclose a picture which will make your soul shudder!”

Elise yielded to her mechanically.  She let herself involuntarily glide down on the sofa, and suffered the countess to take her hand.  “Feodor once belonged to her,” she murmured.  “His heart was once given to another.”

“Will you listen to me?” asked the countess; and, seeing Elise still lost in silent reverie, she continued:  “I will relate to you the history of Feodor von Brenda, and his unhappy, forsaken bride.”  Elise shuddered, and cast a wandering, despairing look around.

“Will you listen to me?” repeated the countess.

“Speak—­I am listening,” whispered Elise, languidly.  And then, the Countess Lodoiska von Sandomir, often interrupted by Elise’s plaintive sighs, her outbursts of heartfelt sympathy, related to the young girl the sad and painful story of her love and her betrayal.

She was a young girl, scarcely sixteen, the daughter of a prince, impoverished by his own fault and prodigality, when she became the victim of her father’s avarice.  Without compassion for her tears, her timid youth, he had sold her for a million.  With the cruel selfishness of a spendthrift miser, he had sold his young, fresh, beautiful daughter for dead, shining metal, to a man of sixty years, fit to be her grandfather, and who persecuted the innocent girl with the ardent passion of a stripling.  She had been dragged to the altar, and the priest had been deaf to the “No!” she had uttered, when falling unconscious at his feet.  Thus she had become the wife of the rich Count Sandomir—­a miserable woman who stood, amidst the splendor of life, without hope, without joy, as in a desert.

But one day this desert had changed, and spring bloomed in her soul, for love had come to warm her chilled heart with the sunbeam of happiness.  She did not reproach herself, nor did she feel any scruples of conscience, that it was not her husband whom she loved.  What respect could she have for marriage, when for her it had been only a matter of sale and purchase?  She had been traded off like a slave, and with happy exultation she said to herself, “Love has come to make me free, and, as a free and happy woman, I will tear this contract by which I have been sold.”  And she had torn it.  She had had no compassion on the gray hairs and devoted heart of her noble husband.  She had been sacrificed, and now pitilessly did she sacrifice her husband to her lover.  She saw but one duty before her—­to reward the love of the man she adored with boundless devotion.  No concealment, no disguise would she allow.  Any attempt at equivocation she regarded as an act of treason to the great and holy feeling which possessed her whole soul.