“Isidora complied, and watched the effect on the listener. He seemed affected--he motioned to her to repeat it. “My love,” said Isidora, “is not this more like the repetition of a theatrical song called for by an audience, than a hymn which he who listens to loves his wife better for, because she loves her God.”--“It is a shrewd question,” said Melmoth, “but why am I in your imagination excluded from the love of God?”--“Do you ever visit the church,” answered the anxious Isidora. A profound silence.--“Do you ever receive the Holy Sacrament?”--Melmoth did not utter a word.--“Have you ever, at my earnest solicitation, enabled me to announce to my anxious family the tie that united us?”--No answer.--“And now--that--perhaps--I dare not utter what I feel! Oh! how shall I appear before eyes that watch me even now so closely?--what shall I say?--a wife without a husband--a mother without a father for her child, or one whom a fearful oath has bound her never to declare! Oh! Melmoth, pity me,--deliver me from this life of constraint, falsehood, and dissimulation. Claim me as your wedded wife in the face of my family, and in the face of ruin your wedded wife will follow--will cling to--will perish with you!” Her arms clung round him, her cold but heart-wrung tears fell fast on his cheek, and the imploring arms of woman supplicating for deliverance in her hour of shame and terror, seldom are twined round us in vain. Melmoth felt the appeal--it was but for a moment. He caught the white arms extended towards him--he fixed an eager and fearful look of inquiry on his victim-consort, as he asked--“And is it so?” The pale and shuddering wife shrunk from his arms at the question--her silence answered him. The agonies of nature throbbed audibly in his heart. He said to himself--it is mine--the fruit of affection--the first-born of the heart and of nature--mine--mine,--and whatever becomes of me, there shall yet be a human being on earth who traces me in its external form, and who will be taught to pray for its father, even when its prayer falls parched and hissing on the fires that burn for ever, like a wandering drop of dew on the burning sands of the desert! * * * * * * * * * “From the period of this communication, Melmoth’s tenderness for his wife visibly increased. “Heaven only knows the source of that wild fondness with which he contemplated her, and in which was still mingled something of ferocity. His warm look seemed like the glow of a sultry summer day, whose heat announces a storm, and compels us by its burning oppression, to look to the storm almost for relief.