'So thou hast come after me, Arwed!' cried she, with a glance of heavenly kindness, and extending towards him her already bandaged right hand. 'You have always acted toward me with the best feelings and intentions.' 'My God, what desperation!' said Arwed. 'This descent might have cost you your life. At all events you have accomplished your wish. So give to Mac Donalbain your farewell kiss, and let us again return to your child and to your father.' 'Not so, Arwed!' answered Christine with determined resolution. 'My child is confided to good hands. My presence can afford neither joy nor comfort to my father. I remain with my husband. You have reason to know what will be my alternative if compulsion is used. You would not constrain me to self-murder. Therefore take my last farewell, and with it my thanks for your truly fraternal love.' 'It is now your duty to interfere, Mac Donalbain,' cried Arwed, earnestly. 'Without Christine I dare not appear before her father. The intelligence that she has persisted in remaining here would cause the old man's death, and he has not deserved that from you. Therefore dissolve the magic spell you have cast around her, and give back the daughter to her father.' 'My crimes have forever loosed the bands which bound us,' said Mac Donalbain, with almost suffocating sorrow, to his wife. 'Therefore leave me now, Christine. It would only increase my misery to know that it was shared by you.' 'I do not believe it, Mac Donalbain,' answered the resolute woman. 'That the society, the sympathy, the consolations, of a being who stands in so near a relation that henceforth she will only live and breathe for you, must lighten your sufferings, I am fully convinced; and in despite of your generous untruth I remain your companion.' 'Well, then,' cried Mac Donalbain, wildly, 'if you will at all events remain the wife of a condemned criminal, you must respect the husband's authority. The wife owes obedience to the husband, and I command you to return to your father!' 'You cannot command me to do that,' answered Christine. 'I am your wedded wife. I have never given you cause to be dissatisfied with me, but have always faithfully adhered to you, up to this sad moment. You have no right to separate yourself from me without my consent, and by Almighty God I will never give it!' 'Be merciful, as our Father in Heaven is merciful!' said the preacher to the weeping Arwed. 'So far as I understand this sad history, it appears, even to me, better to permit the unhappy woman to remain with her husband. What but severe reproof and bitter scorn can she now expect in the upper world? Here, on the contrary, she can perhaps preserve a distracted mind from despair and lead it to true repentance and amendment, which is always a commendable work and acceptable to God.' 'How can I venture,' rejoined Arwed, 'to leave the poor woman here, helpless, amid the horrors of nature and the outcasts of society, whose destiny her husband must share?'