friend, I fear I have almost as
vehemently longed for the presence of him once more, as for that more
awful presence: heaven pardon me if it was wicked! So welcome prison,
welcome death! Half a hundred and nineteen years spent pleasantly on
these green hills, free, and fresh, and hale, I can surely afford a few
weeks or months to a closer place, were it but as in a school for my
poor earthly and ignorant soul, to purify itself, to prepare itself for
that glorious place, to learn to die."

Next morning the old couple, dame Bevan being mounted on a pillion
behind him, proceeded on their melancholy journey. They reached the
house by the park, where it was proposed that an interview should take
place between the old man and the landlord himself, with some view to
arrangement prior to his imprisonment. While they there expect the long
delayed comfort of Winifred's embrace, let us return to that good
daughter, now more eager to fly to that dreaded suitor, to reverse her
father's resolve, to offer herself a victim, than ever she had been to
reach that dearer one who had now cruelly disappointed her in the hope
of one more meeting--that, perhaps, the last she could have innocently
allowed!

The dreaded day of trial arrived. But we must revert to her sad
meditations, and wild irresolute thoughts, while shut up by the
storm-cloud, and alone, in the mountain house. Doating passion, pain of
heart, terrible suggestions of despair, kept altering her countenance as
she leaned against the mouldering door-post, imprisoned by the black
mists that prevented her safely leaving the hovel. A sudden, dire,
revolution in her religious impressions was wrought, or rather
completed, in that dismal scene. David had more than once wrung her very
soul by dark hints of self-destruction in the event of her ever
forsaking him. He had thus been led into discussions on suicide, and had
even argued for the moral right of man to end his own being under
circumstances. Persuasion hangs on the lips of those we love. What she
would have rejected as impious, from some immoral man, in dispute, sank
deep into her soul, emanating from a heart she loved, through lips that,
to her, seemed formed for eloquence as much as love to make its throne.

Wild and tragical modes of reconciling her two furious, fighting,
irreconcilable wishes--that of saving her father--that of blessing her
lover--began to take terrible form and reality in her mind, as the wind
howled, the