As he looked up to her with those glowing, passionate glances, a maiden fear and trembling for the first time came over her, an anxiety and timidity inexplicable to herself!  Her delicate, transparent cheeks paled, tears filled her eyes, and, folding her hands with a childishly supplicating expression, she said in a low, tremulous tone:  “My God, my God!  Have mercy upon me!  I am a wholly abandoned, solitary orphan!  Rescue me yet from this trouble and distress, from this terrible loneliness!”

“Fear nothing, my charming angel,” whispered Carlo, “I will be gentle as a lamb, and patient, very patient in my sorrow; I have sworn it and will keep my oath!  But you must hear me!  You must, only this one time, allow me to express in words my love and my sorrow, my misery and my ecstasy.  Will you allow me this, my lily, my beautiful swan?”

He would have again grasped her hand, but she withdrew it with a proud, angry glance.

“Speak on,” said she, wearily leaning her hand against the myrtle-bush.  “Speak on, I will listen to you!”

And he spoke to her of his love; he informed her of his former life, his poverty, his want, his connection with Corilla, whom he had quitted in order to devote himself wholly to her, to obey, serve, and worship her all his life, and, if necessary, to die for her!  “But you,” he despairingly said, “you know not love!  Your heart is cold for earthly love; like the angels in heaven, you love only the good and the sublime, you love mankind collectively, but not the individual.  Ah, Natalie, you have the heart of an angel, but not the heart of a woman!”

The young maiden had half dreamingly listened to him, her hand leaned back and her glance directed toward the heavens.  She now smiled, and, with an inimitable grace, laying her hand upon her bosom, said in a very low tone:  “And yet I feel that a woman’s heart is beating there.  But it sleeps!  Who will one day come to awaken it?”

Carlo did not understand these low whispered words; he understood only his own passion, his own consuming glow.  And anew he commenced his love-plainings, described to her the torments and fierce joys of an unreturned love, which is yet too strong and overpowering to be suppressed.  And Natalie listened to him with a dreamy thoughtfulness.  His words sounded in her ears like a wonderful song from a strange, distant world which she knew not, but the description of which filled her heart with a sweet longing, and she could have wept, without knowing whether it was for sorrow or joy.

“Thus, Natalie,” at length said Carlo, entirely exhausted and pale with emotion—­“thus I love you.  You must sometime have learned it, and have known that even angels cannot mingle with mortals unloved and unpunished.  I should finally have been compelled to tell you that you might torture no longer, in cruel ignorance; that you, learning to understand your own heart, might tell me whether I have to hope, or only to fear!”