deserve them, let them be devoted to love.' 'Let us then,' said ALMEIDA,
'escape together.' 'To escape with thee,' said: ALMORAN, 'is impossible.
I shall retire, and, like the shaft of Arabia, leave no mark behind, me;
but the flight of ALMEIDA will at once be traced to him by whom I was
admitted, and I shall thus retaliate his friendship with destruction.'
'Let him then,' said ALMEIDA, 'be the partner of our flight.' 'Urge it
not now,' said ALMORAN; 'but trust to my prudence and my love, to select
some hour that will be more favourable to our purpose. And yet,' said
he, 'even then, we shall, as now, sigh in vain for the completion of our
wishes: by whom shall our hands be joined, when in the opinion of the
priests it has been forbidden from above?' 'Save thyself then,' said
ALMEIDA, and leave me to my fate.' 'Not so,' said ALMORAN. 'What else,'
replied ALMEIDA, 'is in our power?' 'It is in our power,' said ALMORAN,
'to seize that joy, to which a public form can give us no new claim; for
the public form can only declare that right by which I claim it now.'

As they were now reclining upon a sofa, he threw his arm round her; but
she suddenly sprung up, and burst from him: the tear started to her eye,
and she gazed upon him with an earnest but yet tender look: 'Is it?'
says she--'No sure, it is not the voice of HAMET!' 'O! yes,' said
ALMORAN, 'what other voice should call thee to cancel at once the wrongs
of HAMET and ALMEIDA; to secure the treasures of thy love from the hand
of the robber; to hide, the joys, which if now we lose we may lose for
ever, in the sacred and inviolable stores of the past, and place them
beyond the power not of ALMORAN only but of fate?' With this wild
effusion of desire, he caught her again to his breast, and finding no
resistance his heart exulted in his success; but the next moment, to the
total disappointment of his hopes, he perceived that she had fainted in
his arms. When she recovered, she once more disengaged herself from him,
and turning away her face, she burst into tears. When her voice could be