With his fiery and mercurial temperament, he had, with a kind of passionate curiosity, adopted the role of a Platonic lover, and the libertine in his character had been subdued by the love of the eccentric.  He had converted this love into a kind of adoration.  He placed Elise upon the altar, and worshipped her as a saint to whom he had turned from the turmoil and wild lust of life, and in the contemplation and worship of whom he could obtain forgiveness of all his sins and errors.  It affected him to think that Elise was praying for him while he, perhaps, forgot her in the whirlpool of pleasure; that she believed in him so devotedly and truly, that she looked up to him so lovingly and humbly—­to him who was so far her inferior.  And in the midst of his wild life of pleasure he felt the need of some saint to intercede for forgiveness for him.  All these new and unaccustomed feelings only enchained him the more closely, and made him consider the possession of her as the most desirable and only worthy object of his life.

She must be his; he was determined to wear this brilliant diamond, the only one he had ever found genuine and without flaw, as his most costly possession; to become, in spite of all difficulties and impossibilities, unmindful of his betrothed bride and his solemn vows, the husband of this beautiful German maiden, who had given herself to him heart and soul.

In proportion to the difficulties that opposed such a union, increased his fierce determination to overcome them.  He was betrothed, and the Empress Elizabeth herself had blessed the betrothal.  He could not, therefore, retract his vows without exciting the anger of his mistress, and history had more than one example to show how violent and annihilating this anger could be.  In like wise, Elise dared not hope ever to obtain the consent of her father to her union with a man who was the enemy of her country.  She was obliged to conceal this love with anxious care from his eyes, if she did not wish to expose herself to the danger of being separated from her lover forever.  She knew that her father, in every thing else uniformly kind and yielding toward her, was on this one subject implacable, and that no tears, no pleading, were capable of moving the firm and energetic will of the ardent patriot.

Both were obliged, therefore, to preserve their love a secret, and in this concealment lay for Feodor a new charm which bound him to her, while it estranged Elise’s heart still more from her father, and chained it in unbounded devotion to her lover.

In the mean while the time arrived for Feodor to leave Berlin with General Sievers.  He swore eternal love and fidelity to Elise, and she vowed to him cheerfully never to become the wife of another, but in patience and trust to await his return, and to hope for the end of the war and the coming of peace, which would solve all difficulties, and remove the opposition of her father.