It was one day, one dark and fatal day, when passion raging in his bosom, and time and opportunity at hand, he suddenly approached her, and seizing her with violence, asked her if she returned his love. “My friendship is ruin,” he cried; “all alliance with me must cast disgrace upon the object of my regard. But, Calantha, you must be mine! May I not even now call you thus? Shall they ever persuade you to abandon me? Vain is all attempt at disguise,” he continued; “I love you to madness and to distraction—you know it too well. Why then suffer me to feel the tortures I endure, when a word—a look from you could relieve me. You are not indifferent: say then that you are not—thou, who alone canst save me. Here even, in the presence of heaven, I will open my whole heart before you—that heart is seared with guilt; it is bleeding with venomed wounds, incurable and deadly. A few short years, I have perhaps yet to linger: thou mayest accelerate my fate, and plunge me still lower, whilst I cling to thee for mercy; but will you do it, because you have the power?” Calantha scarce could support herself. After a moment’s pause, he continued, “You shall hear me.—Never, since the hour of my birth, never—I make no exception of either the living, or, what is far dearer and more sacred to me, the dead—never did I love with such mad and frantic violence as now. O seek not to disguise it; that love is returned. I read it even now in thine eyes, thy lips; and whilst, with assumed and barbarous coldness, you would drive me from you, your own heart pleads for me; and, like myself, you love.” Faint and trembling, Calantha now leant for support upon that arm which surrounded her, and from which she, in vain, attempted to shrink. It was a dreadful moment. Glenarvon, who never yet had sued in vain, marked every varying turn of her countenance which too well expressed his empire and her own weakness. “I cannot live without you.—Mine you are—mine you shall ever be,” he said, “whilst this heart beats with life.” Then with a smile of exultation, he seized her in his arms. Starting however with all the terror which the first approach to guilt must ever cause, “Spare me,” she cried, terrified and trembling: “even though my heart should break in the struggle, let me not act so basely by him to whom I am bound.”—“Say only, that you do not hate me—say only,” he continued, with more gentleness, and pressing her hand to his lips—“say only, that you share the tortures of agony you have inflicted—say that which I know and see—that I am loved to adoration—even as I love you.”