round them swept a long, black, silky fringe, that shaded and softened without diminishing their lustre by a ray. As soon as she recovered herself sufficiently to speak, she replied to my ardent professions in language which, though somewhat wild and undefined, left me no doubt of her feelings. She told me, too, that she was the daughter of the corregidor; that her mother was dead, and that her father loved her even to idolatry; that she returned his affection; and that never, even were it to wed a monarch, would she leave him. At the same time she spoke enthusiastically, even wildly, of love and passion, and to what it might prompt a determined heart. She spoke, too, of jealousy, but she said it was incompatible with love, for that a mind which felt like hers would instantly convert its love into hate, if it once found itself deceived: and what was there, she asked, that such hate would not do? On this subject she threw out some dark and mysterious hints, which, at any other moment, might have made me estimate the dangerous excess of all her passions; but I was infatuated, and would not see the perils that surrounded the dim gulf into which I was plunging. We talked long, and we talked ardently, and in the end, when, some little time before the play was concluded, she rose to leave me, my brain was in a whirl that wanted little but the name to be madness. "Though I have unlimited power over my own actions," said she, "even perhaps too much so--for, ungrateful that I am!--I sometimes wish my father loved me less, or more wisely;--but, as I said, though I have unlimited power over my own actions, some reasons forbade me to-night receiving you in my own house. To-morrow night you may come. You have remarked," she added, putting on her mask, and wrapping her mantilla round her, "a small door under the window of my dressing-room; at midnight it will be open--come thither, for there are many things I wish to say." She then enjoined me not to leave the theatre till the play was completely over, and left me, my whole mind and thoughts in a state of agitation and confusion hardly to be expressed. I will not say that conscience did not somewhat whisper I was doing wrong; but the tumult of excited passion, and the gratification of my spirit of romance, prevented me even from calculating how far I might be hurried. There was certainly some vague point where I proposed to stop short of vice; and I trust I should have done so, even had not other circumstances intervened to save me therefrom. However that may be, let it be marked and remembered, from the first, that _the steps I took in wrong, by an extraordinary chain of circumstances, caused all the misery of my existence_. CHAPTER IX.