Penetrated with sorrow, and struck with alarm, Harleigh looked at her in silence; but when again he sought to take her hand, shrinking from his touch, though regarding him with an expression that supplicated rather than commanded forbearance; 'If you would not kill me, Mr Harleigh,' she cried, 'you will relinquish this terrible perseverance!' 'Relinquish?' he repeated, 'What now? Now, that all delicacy for this wild, eccentric, though so generous Elinor is at an end? that she has, herself, annulled your engagement? Relinquish, now, the hopes so long pursued,--so difficultly caught? No, I swear to you--' Juliet arose. 'Oh hold, Mr Harleigh!' she cried; 'recollect yourself a moment! I lament if I have, involuntarily, caused you any transient mistake; yet, do me the justice to reflect, that I have never cast my destiny upon that of Miss Joddrel. No decision, therefore, of hers can make any change in mine.' She again put her hand upon the lock of the door. Harleigh fixt upon her his eyes, which spoke the severest disturbance, while, in tremulous accents, he uttered, 'And can you leave me thus, to wasting despondence?--and with this cold, chilling, blighting composure?--Is it from pitiless apathy, which incapacitates for judging of torments which it does not experience?--O no! Those eyes that so often glisten with the most touching sensibility,--those cheeks that so beautifully mantle with the varying dies of quick transition of sentiment,--that mouth, which so expressively plays in harmony with every word,--nay, every thought,--all, all announce a heart where every virtue is seconded and softened by every feeling!--a mind alive to the quickest sensations, yet invigorated with the ablest understanding! a soul of angelic purity!--' Some sound from the passage made him suddenly stop, and remove his foot; while the hand of Juliet dropt from the lock. They were both silent, and both, affrighted, stood suspended; till Juliet, shocked at the impropriety of such a situation, forced herself to open the door,--at the other side of which, looking more dead than alive, stood Elinor, leaning upon her sister. 'I began to think,' she cried, in a hollow tone, 'that you were eloped!--and determining to trust to no messenger, I came myself.' She then endeavoured to call forth a smile; but it visited so unwillingly features nearly distorted by internal agony, that it gave a cast almost ghastly to her countenance.