ez. The same person, no doubt, poisoned her father against me,
for henceforth Alvarez never spoke of me with that partiality he had
previously felt. They repaired to London: her father was often absent,
and often engaged with men whom she had never seen before; he was
absorbed and uncommunicative, and she was still ignorant of the nature
of his schemings and designs.

At length, after an absence of several weeks, Barnard reappeared, and
his visits became constant; he renewed his suit to her father as well
as herself. Then commenced that domestic persecution, so common in this
very tyrannical world, which makes us sicken to bear, and which, had
Isora been wholly a Spanish girl, she, in all probability, would never
have resisted: so much of custom is there in the very air of a climate.
But she did resist it, partly because she loved me,--and loved me
more and more for our separation,--and partly because she dreaded and
abhorred the ferocious and malignant passions of my rival, far beyond
any other misery with which fortune could threaten her. "Your father
then shall hang or starve!" said Barnard, one day in uncontrollable
frenzy, and left her. He did not appear again at the house. The
Spaniard's resources, fed, probably, alone by Barnard, failed. From
house to house they removed, till they were reduced to that humble one
in which I had found them. There, Barnard again sought them; there,
backed by the powerful advocate of want, he again pressed his suit, and
at that exact moment her father was struck with the numbing curse of his
disease. "There and then," said Isora, candidly, "I might have yielded
at last, for my poor father's sake, if you had not saved me."

Once only (I have before recorded the time) did Barnard visit her in the
new abode I had provided for her, and the day after our conversation on
that event Isora watched and watched for me, and I did not come. From
the woman of the house she at last learned the cause. "I forgot," she
said timidly,--and in conclusion, "I forgot womanhood, and modesty, and
reserve; I forgot the customs of your country, the decencies of my
own; I forgot everything in this world, but you,--you suffering and in
danger; my very sense of existence seemed to pass from me, and to be
supplied by a breathless, confused, and overwhelming sense of impatient
agony, which ceased not till I was in your chamber, and by your side!
And--now, Morton, do not despise me for not having considered more, a