But Adelheid de Willading, though a woman in the liveliness and
fervor of her imagination, as well as in the proneness to conceive her own
ingenuous conceptions to be more founded in reality than a sterner view of
things might possibly have warranted, was a woman also in the more
generous qualities of the heart, and in those enduring principles, which
seem to have predisposed the better part of the sex to make the heaviest
sacrifices rather than be false to their affections. While her frame
shuddered, therefore, with the violence and abruptness of the emotions she
had endured, dawnings of the right gleamed upon her pure mind, and it was
not long before she was able to contemplate the truth with the steadiness
of principle, though it might, at the same time, have been with much of
the lingering weakness of humanity. When she lowered her hands, she looked
towards the mute and watchful Sigismund, with a smile that caused the
deadly paleness of her features to resemble a gleam of the sun lighting
upon a spotless peak of her native mountains.
"It would be vain to endeavor to conceal from thee, Sigismund," she said,
"that I could wish this were not so.
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