tenderness which still melted my heart for HAMET.' 'I believe thee,'
said HAMET, catching her in a transport to his breast: 'I love thee for
thy virtue; and may the pure and exalted beings, who are superior to the
passions that now throb in my heart, forgive me, if I love thee also for
thy fault. Yet, let the danger to which it betrayed thee, teach us still
to walk in the strait path, and commit the keeping of our peace to the
Almighty; for he that wanders in the maze of falsehood, shall pass by
the good that he would meet, and shall meet the evil that he would shun.
I also was tempted; but I was strengthened to resist: if I had used the
power, which I derived from the arts that have been practised against
me, to return evil for evil; if I had not disdained a secret and
unavowed revenge, and the unhallowed pleasures of a brutal appetite; I
might have possessed thee in the form of ALMORAN, and have wronged
irreparably myself and thee: for how could I have been admitted, as
HAMET, to the beauties which I had enjoyed as ALMORAN? and how couldst
thou have given, to ALMORAN, what in reality had been appropriated by
HAMET?'




CHAP. XVII.


But while ALMEIDA and HAMET were thus congratulating each other upon the
evils which they had escaped, they were threatened by others, which,
however obvious, they had overlooked.

ALMORAN, who was now exulting in the prospect of success that had
exceeded his hopes, and who supposed the possession of ALMEIDA before