Elizabeth listened to Vasili's account of his hairbreadth escapes, his toils, and desperate valour, with tearful eyes and an aching heart. "Oh! that I could attach him to life!" she thought. She never complained to him, nor persuaded him to alter his desperate purpose, but redoubled her affectionate attentions. When he left her, after a hurried visit, she did not beseech him to preserve himself; but her tearful eyes, the agony with which she returned his parting embrace, her despondent attitude as his bark left the shore; and, when he returned, her eager joy--her eye lighted up with thankful love--all bespoke emotions that needed no other interpreter, and which often made him half shrink from acting up to the belief he had arrived at, that he ought to die, and that he could only escape worse and ignominious evils by a present and honourable death. As time passed on--as by the arrival of the forces from Egypt the warfare grew more keen and perilous--as Vasili renewed the sad tale of his perils at each visit, with some added story of lately and narrowly escaped peril--fear began to make too large and engrossing a portion of her daily thoughts. She ceased to take in the ideas as she read--her needle dropped from her hand--and, as she played, the music brought streams of tears from her eyes, to think of the scene of desolation and suffering in which she felt that she should soon be called upon to take a part. There was no help or hope, and she must early learn the woman's first and hardest lesson, to bear in silence the advance of an evil which might be avoided, but for the unconquerable will of another. Almost she could have called her father cruel, had not the remembrance of the misery that drove him to desperation inspired pity, instead of selfish resentment. He had passed a few days with her, and the intercourse they held had been more intimate and more affectionate than ever. As she grew older, her mind, enriched by cultivation, and developed by the ardour of her attachment, grew more on an equality with his experienced one, than could have been the case in mere childhood. They did not take the usual position of father and child--the instructer and instructed--the commander and the obedient-- "They talked with open heart, and tongue Affectionate and true, A pair of friends." And the inequality which made her depend on him, and caused him to regard her as the creature who was to prolong his existence, as it were, beyond the grave, into which he believed himself to be descending, gave a touch of something melancholy to their sympathy, without which, in this shadowy world, nothing seems beautiful and enduring.