"No, mother! that I can never do! If it were all but a dream my soul would still bleed to death from it."
Frau Salden had risen from her bed; she felt really better; only the internal conflict still remained imprinted in her features.
With unenvious pleasure, Eva contemplated her mother, as she sat before the mirror, in order to arrange her hair flowing down abundantly; she thought herself less beautiful, less bountifully endowed by Nature, than was the mother over whom years had passed tracelessly away; could she compete with that splendid figure, with that nobility, those decided movements, that charm of her fully-developed form?
She could not help it; she must fold her mother to her heart with words of glowing flattery.
Frau Salden struggled gently against the love of a child, for whom she had just prepared the greatest anguish of its life.
"Go to sleep, Eva," repeated she, with motherly anxiety.
"Sleep--it would be best! I cannot conceive that I could look with waking eyes at the people before whom I stood yesterday in such utter abasement. It would be impossible for me to show myself here to the gaping crowd. I must away, away from here; but I cannot part from you with this enigma unsolved. Mother! I implore you, give me certainty--I have courage to bear all."
"And you do not ask if I have courage to confess all?"
"Mother!" cried Eva, doubting and questioning, with the terror of presentiment.
"If it were so easy to lift the veil, should I not have raised it long since? If any happiness, any comfort could arise from it, should I hesitate with such a disclosure?"
"I would have the truth, mother--the truth! In positive certainty I shall recover my strength of mind, which is paralysed in this gnawing doubt."
Frau Salden rose from her toilet; the morning sun shone straight upon her face, she covered it with her hands; then she turned round, but a burning colour rested upon her features, and an internal tremor shook her form as if with ague.
"I belong to that community which was scattered by the law of the country; one of the rules of that sect demands full confession of our sins, by thought, word, or deed! It was often hard for us to make this confession before the Saints and Pure ones, and not to conceal aught of that which stirred our inmost souls; often have I stood there hesitating and seeking to veil that which I dared not confess, until the implacable word compelled me to acknowledge the whole truth without any fraudulent disguise; yet, what was that confession compared with the one of to-day--compared with the one by which the mother must ruin her daughter's happiness?"