Page:Libussa, Duchess of Bohemia; also, The Man Without a Name.djvu/118

102 shadow of the trees. She believed herself to have been misled by that error, and to have mistaken the place of appointment; she therefore crossed all the alleys of the grove from the first to the last, but her knight with his carriage and four was nowhere to be seen. She was greatly discomfited at this aceident, and did not know what to make of it. Not to appear at a given rendezvous, is in itself a great crime among lovers; but to be absent in the present case, was more than high treason towards love. The affair was incomprehensible to her. After having waited for an hour in vain, with her heart trembling from fear and cold, she began bitterly to cry and complain: “Alas! the faithless one mocks me; he is in the arms of a rival, and unable to disengage himself from her, and has disdained my faithful love!” That thought brought the long-neglected pedigree again to her recollection, and she was ashamed to have forgotten herself so far as to love a man without a name and without noble sentiments. When the influence of passion had ceased, she took advice from reason, how she should repair the error she had committed, and that faithful adviser counselled her to return to the castle, and bury in oblivion all thoughts of her faithless