"With clasped hands Eva looked imploringly at her mother.
"Well, then, bury your head in my lap; do not look at me; believe that it is the Angel of Judgment who speaks, who holds the rattling scales high above your head."
Eva knelt down before her mother, and leaned her head in her mother's lap.
"I do not hate Herr von Blanden--never have hated him--but I have loved him."
Noiselessly Eva slid down at her mother's feet. Only after some little time she recovered her senses in her parent's arms.
"I have loved him," repeated the mother, "and that is worse, far worse!"
"And you love him still?" asked Eva, "and you are angry with me that I would rob you of him? but he--how could he--"
"Listen to me, my child! We were both members of a devout community, misjudged by the world; this brought us closer together. A decision in council of the Superiors destined me for his spiritual bride!"
"That in our circle is deemed a bond, which is bound for all eternity!"
"And is not every bride a spiritual one, and every bond united for everlasting endurance?"
"The secret understanding of such matters is only revealed to the elect! But the mutual delights of devotion, the strengthening of the Divine Will in us, with the increasing danger of probation, all these exercises did not find us so strong as the faith and the prayers of the community required! Earthly affection took possession of our hearts. I offered weak resistance to his tempestuous passion. Let the dreadful word suffice you--I loved him."
Eva suppressed a loud cry, with lips firmly pressed together, and buried her head deeper in the folds of the dress.
"I was doubly guilty, because the holy work had led us to damnation. The penance inflicted for such impiety was lighter than I feared, because the superior leader of our community, blessed with especial powers of enlightenment, undertook to sanctify me, and I could soon stand purified from that sin. Now only the heavy punishment comes upon me, crushingly, annihilatingly. Too mild was the work of that atonement. Heaven has rejected it. I feel it, and now it dooms me to the full weight of its wrath. In deepest degradation I must humble myself before my own daughter, in order to destroy the happiness of whose life the spectre hand of that unholy, blissful hour is stretched forth from out the past. Forgive me, my beloved child!"