Elise had grown old internally—­old, despite her two-and-twenty years; she looked upon the life before her as a joyless, desert waste, which she had to traverse with bleeding feet and broken heart; and in the desolation of her soul, she sometimes shuddered at the death-like apathy and quiet of her feelings, broken by no sound, no note, not even the wail of woe.

She was without a wish, without a hope.  Grief had spent itself on her.  She wept no more—­she wrestled no longer with her love, for she had conquered it.  But she could not rise again to any new joys of life—­she could only be resigned.  She had accepted life, and she bore it as does the bird shut up in a gilded cage, robbed of freedom and fresh air, and given in return a brilliant prison.  She, too, was an imprisoned bird; and her wounded heart lay in the cage of her breast, sorrowful and infinitely wretched.  She prayed to God for peace, for resignation, no longer for happiness, for she did not believe happiness any more possible.  She had sunk into that apathy which desires nothing more than a quiet, dreamy fading away.  Her grief was deficient in the animating consolation of the thought that “it came from God.”  Real and sacred suffering, which does come from God, and is imposed upon us by fate, always carries with it the divine power of healing; and at the same time that it casts us down and humbles us, raises us again, steels our courage, and makes us strong and proud to suffer and to bear.  Quite different is that misfortune which comes from man—­which is laid upon us by the envy, hatred, and malice of mankind.  This carries with it no consolation, no comfort—­a misfortune full of bitterness and murmuring—­a misfortune which abases us without elevating us again, which casts us down in the mire, from the soil of which not all the hot streams of our tears can purify and cleanse us.  Had she lost her lover, had he been snatched away from her by death, Elise, while she gave him back to God, would have regarded this heavy and sacred affliction as her great and holy happiness; she would have accepted it as a precious promise which elevated her, and inspired her with a blissful hope.

But she had lost him by his own treachery, by worldly sin, and she had given him up, not to God, but to his own unrighteousness and disloyalty.  She had therefore lost him irretrievably, and for always—­not for a short space of time, but for all eternity; and she dared not even weep for him, for her misfortune was at the same time her disgrace, and even her tears filled her with humiliation and shame.  For that reason she never spoke, either with her father or with Bertram, about the sad and painful past, about the errors and disappointments of her youth; and neither of them in their pure and indulgent love ever trespassed on the silence which Elise had spread over her sorrow.  Toward her father she was a careful, attentive, and submissive daughter; toward Bertram a confiding and loving sister; but to both she felt as if she were only giving what was saved from the shipwreck of her affections.  They both knew that Elise could no longer offer them an entire, unbroken heart.  But they were both content to rest on the embers of this ruined edifice, to gather the leaves of this rose, broken by the tempest, and to remember how beautiful it was in its bloom.