The dreaded day of trial arrived. But we must revert to her sad meditations, and wild irresolute thoughts, while shut up by the storm-cloud, and alone, in the mountain house. Doating passion, pain of heart, terrible suggestions of despair, kept altering her countenance as she leaned against the mouldering door-post, imprisoned by the black mists that prevented her safely leaving the hovel. A sudden, dire, revolution in her religious impressions was wrought, or rather completed, in that dismal scene. David had more than once wrung her very soul by dark hints of self-destruction in the event of her ever forsaking him. He had thus been led into discussions on suicide, and had even argued for the moral right of man to end his own being under circumstances. Persuasion hangs on the lips of those we love. What she would have rejected as impious, from some immoral man, in dispute, sank deep into her soul, emanating from a heart she loved, through lips that, to her, seemed formed for eloquence as much as love to make its throne. Wild and tragical modes of reconciling her two furious, fighting, irreconcilable wishes--that of saving her father--that of blessing her lover--began to take terrible form and reality in her mind, as the wind howled, the ruinous house shook, and its timbers groaned, and the blackness of the sky, as the storm increased, deepened the lurid hue of the foul and turbulent fog, (for such the mountain cloud thus in contact with her eyes appeared.) The world, as it were, already left behind, or rather below, the elements alone warring round her, her high-wrought imagination began to regard life and death, and the world itself, as things no longer appertaining to her, except as a passive instrument toward one great object, the preservation of her father's freedom, and, if it _were_ possible, also of her own inviolate person--that person which she had, indeed, most solemnly vowed to one alone, David the Telynwr. Not _to_ him--for her innate delicacy rendered such vows repugnant to her; but alone, by the moon or stars, by the cataract, and in the lonely lanes and woods, she had vowed herself to one alone--had dedicated her virgin beauty (in the spirit of those romances she had fatally devoured) to her "night-harper" with as true devotion as ever did white vestal, at the end of her noviciate, devote herself alive and dead to the one God. Instilled by the touching tone, the wild pathos, the swimming eye of a wayward passionate character, weak, yet bold, of whom she knew almost nothing, this devoted girl yielded up her better reason to his rash innovations in morals, his examples of suicidal heroes, and even _moralists_, among the ancients; and in the wild height, alone, among the clouds, she almost wrought up her fond agonizing soul to a terrible part--the accomplishing her father's preservation, _on her wedding-day_, through the influence she might naturally expect to obtain in such a season, and that done, make her