'Dear Elinor!' cried Harleigh, gently, almost tenderly, 'let me send for some divine!' 'How conscious is this retreat,' she cried, 'of the weakness of your cause! Ah! why thus try to bewilder a poor forlorn traveller, who is dropping with fatigue upon her road? and to fret and goad her on, when the poor tortured wretch languishes to give up the journey altogether? Why not rather, more generously, more like yourself, aid her to attain repose? to open her burning veins, and bid her pent up blood flow freely to her relief? or kindly point the steel to her agonized heart, whose last sigh would be ecstacy if it owed its liberation to your pitying hand! Oh Harleigh! what vain prejudice, what superstitious sophistry, robs me of the only solace that could soothe my parting breath?' 'What is it Elinor means?' cried Harleigh, alarmed, yet affecting to speak lightly: 'Has she no compunction for the labour she causes my blood in thus perpetually accelerating its circulation.' 'Pardon me, dear Harleigh, I have inadvertently run from my purpose to my wishes. To the point, then. Make me, if it be possible, conceive how your reason has thus been played upon, and your discernment been set asleep. I have studied this matter abroad, with the ablest casuists, I have met with; and though I may not retain, or detail their reasoning, well enough to make a convert of any other, they have fixed for ever in my own mind, a conviction that death and annihilation are one. Why do you knit your brow?--And see how Ellis starts!--And why do you both look at me as if I were mad? Mad? because I would rather crush misery than endure it? Mad? because I would rather, at my own time, die the death of reason, than by compulsion, and when least disposed, that of nature? Of reason, that appreciates life but by enjoyment; not of nature, that would make misery linger, till malady or old age dissolve the worn out fabric. To indulge our little miserable fears and propensities, we give flattering epithets to all our meannesses; for what is endurance of worldly pain and affliction but folly? what patience, but insipidity? what suffering, but cowardice? Oh suicide! triumphant antidote to woe! straight forward, unerring route to rest, to repose! I call upon thy aid! I invoke--' 'Repose?--rest?' interrupted Harleigh, 'how earned? By deserting our duties? By quitting our posts? By forsaking and wounding all by whom we are cherished?'