prevail on her to grant me an interview.

"'Tell him,' said she, 'that heaven has forbid it, and to its decrees we
are bound to submit. I am now the wife of another, and it is our duty to
forget all that is past. But if this be possible, my heart tells me it
can be only by our never meeting!'

"In saying this, she wept bitterly; but at the same time exacted a
promise from Fatima, that she would never mention the subject to her
again. Finding her thus inexorable, I fell into a settled melancholy,
and my health was visibly declining. The Europeans consider the natives
of Hindostan to be feeble and effeminate; but the soul, that which
distinguishes man from brutes, acts with an intensity and constancy of
purpose of which they can furnish no examples.

"How long I could have withstood the corrosive effects of my hopeless
passion, irritated as it was by my being in the vicinity of its
object--by hearing perpetually of her beauty, and sometimes catching a
glimpse of it,--I know not; but the Omrah, after a few months spent with
his father-in-law, returned with his bride to his castle in the country.
Yielding now to the wishes of my anxious parents, I consented to travel.
I was at first benefited by the exercise and change of scene; but after
a while, my melancholy returned, and my health grew worse. Though
indifferent to life itself, and all that it now promised, I exerted
myself for the sake of my parents, especially of my mother, who suffered
so acutely on my account: but I carried a barbed arrow in my heart, and
the greater the efforts to extract it, the more they rankled the wound.

"After spending more than a year in travelling, first through the
mountainous district of our country, and then along the coast, and
finding no change for the better, I determined to try the effect of a
sea voyage. I accordingly embarked at Calcutta, in a coasting vessel
that was bound to Madras. At this time I had wasted away to a mere
skeleton, and no one who saw me, believed I could live a month. Such,
indeed, were my own impressions. In the letter which I wrote to my
parents, I endeavoured to prepare them for the worst. When, after a long
voyage, we reached Madras, my health was evidently improved; but a piece
of intelligence I here received, had perhaps a still greater effect I
learnt that Balty Mahu, who had kept himself concealed from me before I
left Benares, had lately visited Madras, on a travelling tour. This news
operated on me