behold me again. Depart to your home, and commence your labours: I shall
watch their progress with unutterable anxiety."

Saying this, he suddenly quitted me, fearful, perhaps, of any change in
my sentiments.


_IV.--The Doom of Frankenstein_


I travelled to England with my friend Henry Clerval, and we parted in
Scotland. I had fixed on one of the remotest of the Orkneys as the scene
of my labours.

Three years before I was engaged in the same manner, and had created a
fiend whose barbarity had desolated my heart. I was now about to form
another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant. He had sworn
to quit the neighbourhood of man, and hide himself in deserts, but she
had not. They might even hate each other, and she might quit him. Even
if they were to leave Europe, a race of devils would be propagated upon
the earth, who might make the very existence of man precarious and full
of terror.

I was alone on a solitary island, when looking up, the monster whom I
dreaded appeared. My mind was made up: I would never create another like
to him.

"Begone," I cried, "I break my promise. Never will I create your equal
in deformity and wickedness. Leave me; I am inexorable."