from the hand of the robber; to hide, the joys, which if now we lose we may lose for ever, in the sacred and inviolable stores of the past, and place them beyond the power not of Almoran only but of fate?’ With this wild effusion of desire, he caught her again to his breast, and finding no resistance his heart exulted in his success; but the next moment, to the total disappointment of his hopes, he perceived that she had fainted in his arms.  When she recovered, she once more disengaged herself from him, and turning away her face, she burst into tears.  When her voice could be heard, she covered herself with her veil, and turning again towards him, ‘All but this,’ said she, ’I had learnt to bear; and how has this been deserved by Almeida of Hamet?  You was my only solace in distress; and when the tears have stolen from my eyes in silence and in solitude, I thought on thee; I thought upon the chaste ardour of thy sacred friendship, which was softened, refined, and exalted into love.  This was my hoarded treasure; and the thoughts of possessing this; soothed all my anguish with a miser’s happiness, who, blest in the consciousness of hidden wealth, despises cold and hunger, and rejoices in the midst of all the miseries that make poverty dreadful:  this was my last retreat; but I am now desolate and forlorn, and my soul looks round, with terror, for that refuge which it can never find.’  ‘Find that refuge,’ said Almoran, ‘in me.’  ‘Alas!’ said Almeida, ’can he afford me refuge from my sorrows, who, for the guilty pleasures of a transient moment, would forever sully the purity of my mind, and aggravate misfortune by the consciousness of guilt?’

As Almoran now perceived, that it was impossible, by any importunity, to induce her to violate her principles; he had nothing more to attempt, but to subvert them.  ‘When,’ said he, ’shall Almeida awake, and these dreams of folly and superstition vanish?  That only is virtue, by which happiness is produced; and whatever produces happiness, is therefore virtue; and the forms, and words and rites, which priests have pretended to be required by Heaven, are the fraudful arts only by which they govern mankind.’

Almeida, by this impious insult, was roused from grief to indignation:  ‘As thou hast now dared,’ said she, ’to deride the laws, which thou wouldst first have broken; so hast thou broken for ever the tender bonds, by which my soul was united to thine.  Such as I fondly believed thee, thou art not; and what thou art, I have never loved.  I have loved a delusive phantom only, which, while I strove to grasp it, has vanished from me.’  Almoran attempted to reply; but on such a subject, neither her virtue nor her wisdom would permit debate.  ‘That prodigy,’ said she, ’which I thought was the sleight of cunning, or the work of sorcery, I now revere as the voice of Heaven; which, as it knew thy heart, has in mercy saved me from thy arms.  To the will of Heaven shall my will be obedient; and my voice also shall pronounce, to Almoran Almeida.’