Aziek hastened to assure him that she had secured her father’s assent without incurring his displeasure: “Thy freedom was unexpectedly offered, upon a condition which I need not detail, as it does not relate to thee. Take thy liberty, prince! and be convinced that though these eyes shall never more behold thee, thine image--the memory of thy misfortunes--thy virtues--thy delightful converse, will exist in my heart, while life and memory--” Tears interrupted the sentence, and she cast herself back upon the bosom of Benzaide. Vehemently agitated by her emotion, Sebastian pressed her to trust herself to his honour, and to quit Africa with him: he promised her the friendship of his Gonsalva, and protection in the exercise of her own religion; he urged to her the delights of polished society; and perhaps Aziek would not have resisted his pleadings had they been seconded by vows of love; but now she was able to feel and to avow the strong claim of filial obligation. Her refusal to desert her father was grounded on arguments which the King wished, but was not able to shake; “Yet I will not say _farewel for ever_!” he said, “were I able to do so, Kara Aziek, I should abhor myself: you are dear to me as a sister, you are the object of the tenderest and truest gratitude that ever penetrated a human heart,--how then can I consent to forego all thought of beholding you again? If Providence permit me to regain my former power, the Moors will no longer find me their enemy: for your sake I will court their friendship, and when in amity with their Xeriff, may tempt my Gonsalva to cross the sea in search of her Sebastian’s guardian angel.” Kara Aziek did not reply; she was overcome by recollection of the price she must pay for his deliverance, a price which would remove her far from the seducing prospect he pictured; formed with all the weakness and strength of woman’s mixed character, she could command her actions but not her emotions; she could constrain every selfish consideration for the sake of another, though she knew not how to conceal the grief such sacrifices cost her: her fast-falling tears now fell without interruption. Shocked and afflicted at her excess of sorrow, the young monarch scarcely knew how to suppose that it originated solely in the regret of parting from him; indeed he wished to believe otherwise, and suffering his imagination to take a new direction, importuned her to say whether she had not heard distressing intelligence of Gaspar, or of some of his dearest friends in Portugal. Aziek hastened to relieve his apprehensions, and by exerting herself to do so, gradually recovered her own composure.