Her first reflection was upon the snare, in which she had been taken; and her first sensation was joy that she had escaped:  she saw at once the whole complication of events that had deceived and distressed her; and nothing more was now necessary, than to explain them to Hamet; which, however, she could not do, without discovering the insincerity of her answers to the enquiries which he had made, while she mistook him for his brother:  ‘If in my heart,’ says she, ’thou hast found any virtue, let it incline thee to pity the vice that is mingled with it:  by the vice I have been ensnared, but I have been delivered by the virtue.  Almoran, for now I know that it was not thee, Almoran, when he possessed thy form, was with me:  he prophaned thy love, by attempts to supplant my virtue; I resisted his importunity, and escaped perdition; but the guilt of Almoran drew my resentment upon Hamet.  I thought the vices which, under thy form, I discovered in his bosom, were thine; and in the anguish of grief, indignation, and disappointment, my heart renounced thee:  yet, as I could not give thee up to death, I could not discover to Almoran the attempt which I imputed to thee; when you questioned me, therefore, as Almoran, I was betrayed to dissimulation, by the tenderness which still melted my heart for Hamet.’  ‘I believe thee,’ said Hamet, catching her in a transport to his breast:  ’I love thee for thy virtue; and may the pure and exalted beings, who are superior to the passions that now throb in my heart, forgive me, if I love thee also for thy fault.  Yet, let the danger to which it betrayed thee, teach us still to walk in the strait path, and commit the keeping of our peace to the Almighty; for he that wanders in the maze of falsehood, shall pass by the good that he would meet, and shall meet the evil that he would shun.  I also was tempted; but I was strengthened to resist:  if I had used the power, which I derived from the arts that have been practised against me, to return evil for evil; if I had not disdained a secret and unavowed revenge, and the unhallowed pleasures of a brutal appetite; I might have possessed thee in the form of Almoran, and have wronged irreparably myself and thee:  for how could I have been admitted, as Hamet, to the beauties which I had enjoyed as Almoran? and how couldst thou have given, to Almoran, what in reality had been appropriated by Hamet?’

CHAP.  XVII.

But while Almeida and Hamet were thus congratulating each other upon the evils which they had escaped, they were threatened by others, which, however obvious, they had overlooked.