230 THE PROUD " LADYE." 



opportunities for mischief are never wanting, especially when 

 their arts are directed against the frank and the unsuspecting. 

 Wilhelm's every movement was watched by his enemies, his 

 foreign correspondence was pried into with curious eyes, and 

 at length, circumstances, innocent in themselves, but becoming 

 noxious from their arrangement, were accumulated to form a 

 plausible and well-concocted falsehood. 



Isabel listened with cold incredulity to the tale of Wilhelm's 

 baseness and selfishness, but when facts, which she well knew, 

 were brought as testimony of these charges, she imbibed the 

 poison of distrust into her noble nature. The pride which she 

 had flung aside as useless beneath the safe-guard of affection, 

 was now re-assumed to cloak her real sorrow, and to outward 

 seeming, she was as cold and frigidly correct in feeling as the 

 veriest prude could desire. By the insidious advice of a brother, 

 in whom she implicitly relied, she wrote a calm letter of 

 renunciation to Wilhelm, and then, little dreaming that he had 

 pride equal to her own, she impatiently awaited the moment 

 of explanation which she firmly believed he would seek. 



Three days after he received that fatal letter, Wilhelm sailed 

 for Europe. He uttered not one word of remonstrance, he 

 breathed no farewell, silently he struggled with his agony, and 

 in bitter but unuttered anguish he left his native shores forever. 

 The ship in which he sailed was richly freighted with human 

 virtues, and with human affections. Many a prayer had been 

 wafted on the gale which bore her on her distant course, but 

 the decree had gone forth, and not a man of all that goodly 



