“The Father Jose made no answer. He was now in the passage, where a circumstance which he observed had arrested all his attention,--the door of Isidora’s apartment was open, and lights were burning in it. He entered it slowly at first, and gazed around, but its inmate was not there. He glanced his eye on the bed, but no human form had pressed it that night--it lay untouched and undisturbed. The casement next caught his eye, now glancing with the quickness of fear on every object. He approached it--it was wide open,--the casement that looked towards the garden. In his horror at this discovery, the good Father could not avoid uttering a cry that pierced the ears of Donna Clara, who, trembling and scarce able to make her way to the room, attempted to follow him in vain, and fell down in the passage. The priest raised and tried to assist her back to her own apartment. The wretched mother, when at last placed in her chair, neither fainted or wept; but with white and speechless lips, and a paralytic motion of her hand, tried to point towards her daughter’s apartment, as if she wished to be conveyed there. “It is too late,” said the priest, unconsciously using the ominous words quoted in the letter of Don Francisco. CHAPTER XXIV. Responde meum argumentum--nomen est nomen--_ergo_, quod tibi est nomen--responde argumentum. _BEAUMONT and FLETCHER’S Wit at several Weapons._ “That night was the one fixed on for the union of Isidora and Melmoth. She had retired early to her chamber, and sat at the casement watching for his approach for hours before she could probably expect it. It might be supposed that at this terrible crisis of her fate, she felt agitated by a thousand emotions,--that a soul susceptible like hers felt itself almost torn in pieces by the struggle,--but it was not so. When a mind strong by nature, but weakened by fettering circumstances, is driven to make one strong spring to free itself, it has no leisure to calculate the weight of its hindrances, or the width of its leap,--it sits with its chains heaped about it, thinking only of the bound that is to be its liberation--or---- “During the many hours that Isidora awaited the approach of this mysterious bridegroom, she felt nothing but the awful sense of that approach, and of the event that was to follow. So she sat at her casement, pale but resolute, and trusting in the extraordinary promise of Melmoth, that by whatever means he was enabled to visit her, by those she would be enabled to effect her escape, in spite of her well-guarded mansion, and vigilant household.