“Calantha,” at length Glenarvon said, “before I explain myself, let me press thee once more to my heart—let me pour out the agonies of my soul, to my only friend. I have promised your aunt to leave you: yes; for thy dear sake, I will go; and none shall hereafter say of me, that I led you to share my ruined fortunes, or cast disgrace upon your name! Whatever my wrongs and injuries, to others, let one woman exist to thank me for her preservation. It will break my heart; but I will do it. You will hear dreadful things of me, when I am away: you will learn to hate, to curse me.” “Oh never, Glenarvon, never.” “I believe you love me,” he continued; “and ere we part, ere we forget every vow given and received—every cherished hope, now blighted so cruelly for me, give me some proof of your sincerity. Others perhaps have been my victims; I, alas! am yours. You do not know, you cannot know what I feel, you have made me insensible to every other pursuit. I seem to exist alone in you, and for you, and can you, can you then abandon me? go if it be your pleasure, receive the applause of the world, of friends, of those who affect the name; and when they hear that Glenarvon has fled, a voluntary exile from his country without one being to share his sorrows, perishing by slow degrees of a cruel and dangerous malady, which long has preyed upon his constitution, then let your husband and your aunt triumph in the reflection, that they have hastened his doom. And you, wretched victim, remember that, having brightened for a few short hours my weary path, you have left me at the last more lonely, more deserted even than when first you appeared before me. Oh Calantha, let others mock at my agony, and doubt the truth of one who has but too well deserved their suspicions; but do not you refuse to believe me. Young as I appear, I have made many miserable: but none more so than myself; and, having cast away every bright hope of dawning fame and honor, I renounce even now the only being who stands like a guardian angel between myself and eternal perdition. Oh canst thou doubt such love? and yet believing it, wilt thou consent that I should thus abandon thee? I have sacrificed for thee the strong passions that, like vultures, prey upon my heart—fortune, honor, every hope, even beyond the grave, for thy happiness—for thy love! Ah say canst thou—wilt thou now abandon me?”