She ceased, and her blue eyes swam in tears as she turned them glistening with affection towards the stranger. He averted his head from her gaze, and a scornful sneer of the darkest, the deadliest malice passed over his fine countenance. In an instant the expression subsided, his fixed glassy eye resumed its unearthly chillness, and he turned once again to his companion. ‘It is the hour of sunset,’ he exclaimed; ‘the soft, the beauteous hour, when the hearts of lovers are happy, and Nature smiles in unison with their feelings; but to me it will smile no longer. Ere the morrow dawns I shall be far, very far, from the house of my beloved, from the scenes where my heart is enshrined, as in a sepulchre. Must I leave you, sweetest flower of the wilderness, to be the sport of the whirlwind, the prey of the mountain blast?’ ‘No, we will not part,’ replied the impassioned girl: ‘where thou goest will I go; thy home shall be my home, and thy God shall be my God.’ ‘Swear it, swear it,’ resumed the stranger, wildly grasping her by the hand; ‘swear to the oath I shall dictate.’ He then desired her to kneel, and holding his right hand in a menacing attitude towards heaven, and throwing back his dark raven locks, he exclaimed with the ghastly smile of an incarnate fiend, ‘May the curses of an offended God haunt you, cling to you for ever, in the tempest and in the calm, in the day and in the night, in sickness and in sorrow, in life and in death, should you swerve from the promise you have made to be mine. May the dark spirits of the damned howl in your ears the accursed chorus of fiends; may despair rack your bosom with the quenchless flames of hell! May your soul be as the lazar-house of corruption, where the ghost of departed pleasure sits enshrined, as in a grave, where the hundred-headed worm never dies, where the fire is never extinguished. May a spirit of evil lord it over your brow, and proclaim as you pass by, “This is the abandoned of God and man”; may fearful spectres haunt you in the night season; may your dearest friends drop day by day into the grave, and curse you with their dying breath; may all that is most horrible in human nature, more solemn than language can frame or lips can utter, may this, and more than this, be your eternal portion should you violate the oath you have taken.’ He ceased, and hardly knowing what she did, the terrified girl acceded to the awful adjuration, and promised eternal fidelity to him who was henceforth to be her lord.