Rhyddlan." "Be not uneasy, my fair one," answered Roderic. "We go,
though not by the usual path, to where your friends reside. I am not
your enemy, but a swain who esteems it his happiness to have come
between you and your distress, and to have rescued you from the pelting
of the storm. Suspend, my love, for a few moments your suspicions and
your anxiety, and we shall arrive where all your doubts will be removed,
and all I hope will be pleasure and felicitation." While he thus spoke
the chariot hastened to the conclusion of their journey, and entered the
area in the front of the mansion of Roderic.

The suspicions of Imogen were indeed removed, but in a manner too cruel
for her tender frame. The terror and fatigue she had previously
undergone had wasted her spirits, and the surprise she now experienced,
was more than she could sustain. As the chariot entered the court, she
cried out with a voice of horror and anguish, and sunk breathless into
the arms of her ravisher. Though the passion he had already conceived
for her, made this a circumstance of affliction, he yet in another view
rejoiced, that he was able, by its intervention, to conduct his prize in
a manner by stealth into his palace, and thus to prevent that struggle
and those painful sensations, which she must otherwise have known. For
could she have borne, without emotion, to see herself conveyed into a
wretched imprisonment? Could she have submitted, without opposition, to
be shut up, as it were, from the hope of revisiting those scenes, where
once her careless childhood played, and those friends whom she valued
more than life?

The leading pursuit of Roderic, as it had been stated by the Druid of
Elwy, was the love of pleasure, an attachment to sensuality, luxury and
lust. He often spent whole days in the bosom of voluptuousness, reposing
upon couches of down, under ceilings of gold. His senses were at