heard, she covered herself with her veil, and turning again towards him,
'All but this,' said she, 'I had learnt to bear; and how has this been
deserved by ALMEIDA of HAMET? You was my only solace in distress; and
when the tears have stolen from my eyes in silence and in solitude, I
thought on thee; I thought upon the chaste ardour of thy sacred
friendship, which was softened, refined, and exalted into love. This was
my hoarded treasure; and the thoughts of possessing this; soothed all my
anguish with a miser's happiness, who, blest in the consciousness of
hidden wealth, despises cold and hunger, and rejoices in the midst of
all the miseries that make poverty dreadful: this was my last retreat;
but I am now desolate and forlorn, and my soul looks round, with terror,
for that refuge which it can never find.' 'Find that refuge,' said
ALMORAN, 'in me.' 'Alas!' said ALMEIDA, 'can he afford me refuge from my
sorrows, who, for the guilty pleasures of a transient moment, would
forever sully the purity of my mind, and aggravate misfortune by the
consciousness of guilt?'

As ALMORAN now perceived, that it was impossible, by any importunity, to
induce her to violate her principles; he had nothing more to attempt,
but to subvert them. 'When,' said he, 'shall ALMEIDA awake, and these
dreams of folly and superstition vanish? That only is virtue, by which
happiness is produced; and whatever produces happiness, is therefore
virtue; and the forms, and words and rites, which priests have pretended
to be required by Heaven, are the fraudful arts only by which they
govern mankind.'

ALMEIDA, by this impious insult, was roused from grief to indignation:
'As thou hast now dared,' said she, 'to deride the laws, which thou
wouldst first have broken; so hast thou broken for ever the tender
bonds, by which my soul was united to thine. Such as I fondly believed