carriage did her good, and the distance was too trifling to
be considered. We could dispatch messengers to Adrian, to inform him of our
deviation from the original plan. She spoke with vivacity, and drew a
picture after her own dear heart, of the pleasure we should bestow upon
Lucy, and declared, if I went, she must accompany me, and that she should
very much dislike to entrust the charge of rescuing them to others, who
might fulfil it with coldness or inhumanity. Lucy's life had been one act
of devotion and virtue; let her now reap the small reward of finding her
excellence appreciated, and her necessity assisted, by those whom she
respected and honoured.

These, and many other arguments, were urged with gentle pertinacity, and
the ardour of a wish to do all the good in her power, by her whose simple
expression of a desire and slightest request had ever been a law with me.
I, of course, consented, the moment that I saw that she had set her heart
upon this step. We sent half our attendant troop on to Adrian; and with the
other half our carriage took a retrograde course back to Windsor.

I wonder now how I could be so blind and senseless, as thus to risk the
safety of Idris; for, if I had eyes, surely I could see the sure, though
deceitful, advance of death in her burning cheek and encreasing weakness.
But she said she was better; and I believed her. Extinction could not be
near a being, whose vivacity and intelligence hourly encreased, and whose
frame was endowed with an intense, and I fondly thought, a strong and
permanent spirit of life. Who, after a great disaster, has not looked back
with wonder at his inconceivable obtuseness of understanding, that could
not perceive the many minute threads with which fate weaves the
inextricable net of our destinies, until he is inmeshed completely in it?

The cross roads which we now entered upon, were even in a worse state than
the long neglected high-ways; and the inconvenience seemed to menace the
perishing frame of Idris with destruction. Passing through Dartford, we
arrived at Hampton on the second day. Even in this short interval my
beloved companion grew sensibly worse in health, though her spirits were
still light, and she cheered my growing anxiety with gay sallies; sometimes
the thought pierced my brain--Is she dying?--as I saw her fair
fleshless hand rest on mine, or observed the feebleness with which she
performed the accustomed acts of life. I drove away the idea, a