"This, too, is my work," said I; "this fair flower is blighted, and withering by the contagious touch of my baneful hand! Good Heaven! what a wretch am I! whoever loves me is rewarded by misery. And what have I gained by this wide waste and devastation which my wickedness has spread around me? Happiness? No, no--that I have lost for ever. Would that _my_ loss were all! would that comfort might visit the soul of this fair creature and another. But I dare not--I cannot pray; I am at enmity with God and man. Yet I will make an effort in favour of this victim of my baseness. O God," continued I, "if the prayers of an outcast like me can find acceptance, not for myself, but for her, I ask that peace which the world cannot give; shower down Thy blessings upon her, alleviate her sorrows, and erase from her memory the existence of such a being as myself. Let not my hateful image hang as a blight upon her beauteous frame." Emily resumed her book when her father had ceased reading aloud; and I saw her wipe a tear from her cheek. The excitement occasioned by this scene, added to my previous illness, from the effects of which I had not sufficiently recovered, caused a faintness; I sat down under the window, in hopes that it would pass off. It did not, however; for I fell, and lay on the turf in a state of insensibility, which must have lasted nearly half an hour. I afterwards learned from Clara that Emily had opened the window, it being a French one, to walk out and recover herself. By the bright moonlight, she perceived me lying on the ground. Her first idea was, that I had committed suicide; and, with this impression, she shut the window, and tottering to the back part of the room, fainted. Her father ran to her assistance, and she fell into his arms. She was taken up to her room, and consigned to the care of her woman, who put her to bed; but she was unable to give any account of herself, or the cause of her disorder, until the following day. For my own part, I gradually came to my senses, and with difficulty regained my chaise, the driver of which told me I had been gone about an hour. I drove off to town, wholly unaware that I had been observed by anyone, much less by Emily. When she related to her father what she had seen, he either disbelieved or effected to disbelieve it, and treated it as the effect of a distempered mind--the phantom of a disordered imagination; and she at length began to coincide with him. I started for the Continent a few days afterwards. Talbot, who had seen little of Clara since my rejection by Emily, and subsequent illness, offered my father to accompany me; and Clara was anxious that he should go, as she was determined not to listen to anything he could say during my affliction; she could not, she said, be happy while I was miserable, and gave him no opportunity of conversing with her on the subject of their union.