to her chamber; and locking the door after her, he began to reflect on what she had said, and grew to all the torment of rage and jealousy, and all the despairs of a passionate lover: and though this hope was not extreme before, yet as lovers do, he found, or fancied a probability (from his lord’s inconstancy, and his own right of marriage) that the necessity she might chance to be in of his friendship and assistance in a strange country, might some happy moment or other render him the blessing he so long had waited for from _Sylvia_; for he ever designed, when either his lord left her, grew cold, or should happen to die, to put in his claim of husband. And the soft familiar way, with which she eternally lived with him, encouraged this hope and design; nay, she had often made him advances to that happy expectation. But this fatal blow had driven him from all his fancied joys, to the most wretched estate of a desperate lover. He traverses his chamber, wounded with a thousand different thoughts, mixed with those of preventing this union the next morning. Sometimes he resolves to fight _Octavio_, for his birth might pretend to it, and he wanted no courage; but he is afraid of being overcome by that gallant man, and either losing his hopes with his life, or if he killed _Octavio_, to be forced from his happiness, or die an ignominious death: sometimes he resolves to own _Sylvia_ for his wife, but then he fears the rage of that dear object of his soul, which he dreads more than death itself: so that tossed from one extreme to another, from one resolution to a hundred, he was not able to fix upon any thing. In this perplexity he remained till day appeared, that day must advance with his undoing, while _Sylvia_ and _Antonet_ were preparing for the design concluded on the last night. This he heard, and every minute that approached gave him new torments, so that now he would have given himself to the Prince of Darkness for a kind disappointment: he was often ready to go and throw himself at her feet, and plead against her enterprise in hand, and to urge the unlawfulness of a double marriage, ready to make vows for the fidelity of _Philander_, though before so much against his own interest, and to tell her all those letters from him were forged: he thought on all things, but nothing remained with him, but despair of every thing. At last the devil and his own subtlety put him upon a prevention, though base, yet the most likely to succeed, in his opinion.