r your own lips--will I
receive a single evidence detracting from your purity, or, Isora,--mine
own, own Isora,--may I not add also--from your love?"

"Too, too generous!" murmured Isora, struggling passionately with her
tears, "may Heaven forsake me if ever I am ungrateful to thee; and
believe--believe, that if love more fond, more true, more devoted than
woman ever felt before can repay you, you shall be repaid!"

Why, at that moment, did my heart leap so joyously within me?--why did I
say inly,--"The treasure I have so long yearned for is found at last:
we have met, and through the waste of years, we will work together, and
never part again"? Why, at that moment of bliss, did I not rather feel
a foretaste of the coming woe? Oh, blind and capricious Fate, that gives
us a presentiment at one while and withholds it at an other! Knowledge,
and Prudence, and calculating Foresight, what are ye?--warnings unto
others, not ourselves. Reason is a lamp which sheddeth afar a glorious
and general light, but leaveth all that is around it in darkness and in
gloom. We foresee and foretell the destiny of others: we march credulous
and benighted to our own; and like Laocoon, from the very altars
by which we stand as the soothsayer and the priest, creep forth,
unsuspected and undreamt of, the serpents which are fated to destroy us!

That very day, then, Alvarez was removed to a lodging more worthy of his
birth, and more calculated to afford hope of his recovery. He bore the
removal without any evident signs of fatigue; but his dreadful malady
had taken away both speech and sense, and he was already more than half
the property of the grave. I sent, however, for the best medical advice
which London could afford. They met, prescribed, and left the patient
just as they found him. I know not, in the progress of science, what
physicians may be to posterity, but in my time they are false witnesses
subpoenaed against death, whose testimony always tells less in favour of
the plaintiff than the defendant.

Before we left the poor Spaniard's former lodging, and when I was on the
point of giving some instructions to the landlady respecting the place
to which the few articles of property belonging to Don Diego and Isora
were to be moved, Isora made me a sign to be silent, which I obeyed.
"Pardon me," said she afterwards; "but I confess that I am anxious
our next residence should not be known,--should not be subject to the
intrusion of--of this-