"If I wait but my king's permission to demand her wedded hand, couldst
thou forbid me the presence of my affianced?"

"She loves thee, then?" said Adam, in a tone of great anguish,--"she
loves thee,--speak!"

"It is my pride to think it."

"Then go,--go at once; come back no more till thou hast wound up thy
courage to brave the sacrifice; no, not till the priest is ready at
the altar, not till the bridegroom can claim the bride. And as that
time will never come--never--never--leave me to whisper to the
breaking heart, 'Courage; honour and virtue are left thee yet, and thy
mother from heaven looks down on a stainless child!'"

The resuscitation of the dead could scarcely have startled and awed
the courtier more than this abrupt development of life and passion and
energy in a man who had hitherto seemed to sleep in the folds of his
thought, as a chrysalis in its web. But as we have always seen that
ever, when this strange being woke from his ideal abstraction, he
awoke to honour and courage and truth, so now, whether, as he had
said, the absence of the Eureka left his mind to the sense of
practical duties, or whether their common suffering had more endeared
to him his gentle companion, and affection sharpened reason, Adam
Warner became puissant and majestic in his rights and sanctity of
father,--greater in his homely household character, than when, in his
mania of inventor, and the sublime hunger of aspiring genius, he had
stolen to his daughter's couch, and waked her with the cry of "Gold!"