At present,
however, they are safe.--Am I now to speak farther on your own affairs,
which involve little short of your life and honour?"

"There is," said Julian, "one, from whom I was violently parted
yesterday; if I knew but of her safety, I were little anxious for my
own."

"One!" returned the voice, "only _one_ from whom you were parted
yesterday?"

"But in parting from whom," said Julian, "I felt separated from all
happiness which the world can give me."

"You mean Alice Bridgenorth," said the Invisible, with some bitterness
of accent; "but her you will never see more. Your own life and hers
depend on your forgetting each other."

"I cannot purchase my own life at that price," replied Julian.

"Then DIE in your obstinacy," returned the Invisible; nor to all the
entreaties which he used was he able obtain another word in the course
of that remarkable night.

CHAPTER XXXVI

A short hough'd man, but full of pride.
--ALLAN RAMSAY.

The blood of Julian Peveril was so much fevered by the state in which
his invisible visitor left him, that he was unable, for a length of
time, to find repose. He swore to himself, that he would discover and
expose the nocturnal demon which stole on his hours of rest, only to add
gall to bitterness, and to pour poison into those wounds which already
smarted so severely. There was nothing which his power extended to,
that, in his rage, he did not threaten. He proposed a closer and a more
rigorous survey of his cell, so that he might discover the mode by which
his tormentor entered, were it as unnoticeable as an auger-hole. If his
diligence should prove unavailing, he determined to inform the jailers,
to whom it could not be indifferent to know, that their prison was open
to such intrusions. He proposed to himself, to discover from their looks
whether they were already privy to these visits; and if so, to denounce
them to the magistrates, to the judges, to the House of Commons, was the
least that his resentment proposed. Sleep surprised his worn-out
frame in the midst of his projects of discovery and vengeance, and, as
frequently happens, the light of the ensuing day proved favourable to
calmer resolutions.

He now reflected that he had no ground to consider the motives of his
visitor as positively malevolent, although he had afforded him little
encouragement to hope for assistance on the points he had most at heart.