Too probably their paths on earth might lie for ever apart. A chasm separated the past from the present; still more did it seem to yawn between the present and the future; so Charlie could but wring his hands, and wish, at times, that Heinrich had never brought him to Frankenburg. Ah, those lovely eyes that were ever varying in expression, now dreamy and tender, and anon bright with mischief, or soft with inexpressible love; the pouting rosebud lips, that were so firm and delicately cut; the skin, smooth as satin; the hands, of velvet: the pinky tint on the rounded cheek; the winning ways and the quaint sayings of Ernestine--were they all, indeed, to be as things of the past to him? It was intolerable! They would be all as air-drawn pictures--nothing more. To Pierrepont, it seemed as if all the brightness had gone out of his life; or, as if half that life had left him. Would time ever cure this, or must it be war or death? God alone knew! In his sorrow for the loss he had sustained, and for the terrible emotions which he knew she would be feeling--torn from him on one hand, and menaced by a hateful marriage on the other--he could almost have wept, and perhaps would have done so, but for a glow of wrath and indignation, at the manner in which the imperious Countess had treated him. He had been bluntly turned out of the house! That was what the termination of his visit plainly amounted to. Charlie felt that his epaulettes had been insulted, and his native English pride revolted at the idea. He felt his blood boiling at times, but against whom? It could not be against the father or the mother of her he loved so tenderly. Oh no! for surely they would relent in time, on seeing how deep and tender was his passion for their daughter. '_How_ would it all end?' he asked of himself a hundred times. The day without was bright and sunny, but to Charlie Pierrepont it seemed as if the hours stole dully, darkly, and drearily on. The guests in the Speise-saal were numerous and noisy. Their voices irritated him; and often he started to his feet with the intention of vaguely proceeding to the vicinity of Frankenburg, and as frequently relinquished the idea; for he dreaded lest he should meet the Baron, and be tempted into the commission of some wild outrage. With much of the same gloom that Herminia had in her mind, when, from the windows of the Grand Hotel, on the evening our story opens, she looked dreamily down on Cologne, on city, church, and river, did Charlie, from a balcony of his hotel, opposite the new theatre, look down upon the strasse that leads to Borcette, and the crowded boulevard that now occupies the place of a levelled ditch and rampart, and is prettily laid out with pine trees, and many tiny sheets of water.