"Oh, these conscientious notions!" grumbled the exhausted man. But
notions or not, Gottfried was firm, and of a marriage-bond with the
child would not hear; he promised to afford the little maiden loving
care and protection--promised to guard her as the apple of his eye--as
his own child, until he could, with confidence, lay her hand into that
of a worthy lover's.
And while he promised this, his voice sounded hollow and sad like the
tolling of a funeral bell. The duke, with the clear-sightedness of the
dying, cast a glance into his brother's heart, and discovered there a
holy secret.
"You're an angel, Gottfried," he murmured, "but you make a mistake,"
and shortly after breathed his last.
On the day of the funeral Dame Isabella von Auberive, a distant
relative whom Gottfried, for propriety's sake, had summoned hither,
arrived at the castle to share with him in the care of the young girl.
Beside her father's bier, surrounded by the dim, flickering candles, he
kissed the sweet orphan reverently on the brow, as one kisses the hem
of a Madonna's robe; and promised her his loving care. But when she, in
a torrent of childish grief, wound her arms about his neck and pressed
her little head against his shoulder, he became almost as white as the
dead man in his coffin, and tenderly but firmly released himself from
her.
It could not be--'twould be sacrilege.