image of you, could alone have supported me! I loved, and to love is to live. Amid the disruption of every natural tie,--amid the loss of that delicious existence which seems a dream, and which still fills my dreams, and makes sleep a second existence,--I have thought of you--have dreamt of you--have loved you!”--“Loved me?--no being yet loved me but pledged me in tears.”--“And have I not wept?” said Isidora--“believe these tears--they are not the first I have shed, nor I fear will be the last, since I owe the first to you.” And she wept as she spoke. “Well,” said the wanderer, with a bitter and self-satirizing laugh, “I shall be persuaded at last that I am “a marvellous proper man.” Well, if it must be so, happy man be his dole! And when shall the auspicious day, beautiful Immalee, _still_ beautiful Isidora, in spite of your Christian name, (to which I have a most anti-catholic objection)--when shall that bright day dawn on your long slumbering eye-lashes, and waken them with kisses, and beams, and light, and love, and all the paraphernalia with which folly arrays misery previous to their union--that glittering and empoisoned drapery that well resembles what of old Dejanira sent to her husband--when shall the day of bliss be?” And he laughed with that horrible convulsion that mingles the expression of levity with that of despair, and leaves the listener no doubt whether there is more despair in laughter, or more laughter in despair. “I understand you not,” said the pure and timid Isidora; “and if you would not terrify me to madness, laugh no more--no more, at least, in that fearful way!”--“_I cannot weep_,” said Melmoth, fixing on her his dry and burning eyes, strikingly visible in the moonlight; “the fountain of tears has been long dried up within me, like that of every other human blessing.”--“I can weep for both,” said Isidora, “if that be all.” And her tears flowed fast, as much from memory as from grief--and when those sources are united, God and the sufferer only know how fast and bitterly they fall. “Reserve them for our nuptial hour, my lovely bride,” said Melmoth to himself; “you will have occasion for them then.”