Her cold hard feelings grew warm and melted, and in this hour the comfort of tears, of which she had been so long deprived, once more became hers.
Gradually the flood tide of emotion began to ebb, and the confusion of loving exclamations and incoherent words gained some order and separated into question and answer.

When Anna learned that the musician had accompanied her sister, she wished to see him, and when he entered, held out both hands, exclaiming: "Meister, Meister, in what a condition you find me again! Henrica, this is the best of men; the only unselfish friend I have found on earth." The succeeding hours were full of sorrowful agitation.
Belotti and the old Italian woman often undertook to speak for the invalid, and gradually the image of a basely-destroyed life, that had been worthy of a better fate, appeared before Henrica and Wilhelm.

Fear, anxiety and torturing doubt had from the first saddened Anna's existence with the unprincipled adventurer and gambler, who had succeeded in beguiling her young, experienced heart.

A short period of intoxication was followed by an unexampled awakening.

She was clasping her first child to her breast, when the unprecedented outrage occurred--Don Luis demanded that she should move with him into the house of a notorious Marchesa, in whose ill-famed gambling-rooms he had spent his evenings and nights for months.