Meanwhile, the disappointed Countess Altheim, foiled by her perfidious friend and versatile lover, broke with the one, and really disdained the other. And though she never condescended to enquire about either, after the double desertion was known to her beyond a doubt; yet she was not insensible to some feeling of gratified revenge, when she heard that Ferdinand had abandoned her rival, and left the country. The Marquis hastened with his remorseful son, to Holland and to England. But the pangs of his repentance had not struck at the root of his crime. He mourned the act of guilt, not the empassioned nature which impelled it. He cursed the hour in which he had ever met with the Baroness Hermanstadt; but he did not condemn the headlong impetuosity with which he yielded to every impulse of self-gratification. The only son of his parents, and heir to immense revenues in both hemispheres, he had been indulged in every wish, till he believed he had no duty in life but to enjoy all its blameless pleasures. But when personal gratification is the principle of existence, the boundary between innocence and transgression is often invisible. Ferdinand had more than once trembled on it. He had now overleaped it.--And though racked with self-abhorrence at what he had done; and hoping, by deeds of penance to repass it; yet he fostered in his heart the passions which had betrayed him: and even found a new temptation for their excesses, in the land of his penitential pilgrimage. By a strange coincidence of fate, while he was sowing tares in the happy fields of Lindisfarne, Countess Altheim was preparing a similar attempt on the peace of its darling Louis. The beautiful Otteline was as widely different from the character of her false friend, as unsunned snow from the molten lava of Vesuvius. She sought for nothing in her union with Ferdinand, but the rank he would bestow on her. His riches and his love were alike indifferent to her. And when she turned her eyes on the handsome secretary of Ignatius, she had no other idea in her meditated attack on his heart, but what aimed at sharing a birthright, which the Empress had assured her, would exceed her proudest wishes. Notwithstanding her incapability of loving, and indeed of feeling any emotion but those connected with her ambition and its disappointments; she was so keen an observer, and so fine an actress, that he must have had an _Ithuriel_ eye, who could have distinguished the counterfeit from the real, in her pretensions.