The third part of an hour had scarcely elapsed, and the sun was yet on
the mountain-tops, when Isabel arrived. She came to announce that the
outbreaks of the Moorish towns in the vicinity rendered the half-
fortified castle of her friend no longer a secure abode; and she honoured
the Spanish lady with a command to accompany her, with her female suite,
to the camp of Ferdinand.

Leila received the intelligence with a kind of stupor. Her interview
with her father, the strong and fearful contests of emotion which that
interview occasioned, left her senses faint and dizzy; and when she found
herself, by the twilight star, once more with the train of Isabel, the
only feeling that stirred actively through her stunned and bewildered
mind, was, that the hand of Providence conducted her from a temptation
that, the Reader of all hearts knew, the daughter and woman would have
been too feeble to resist.

On the fifth day from his departure, Almamen returned to find the castle
deserted, and his daughter gone.




CHAPTER V.

IN THE FERMENT OF GREAT EVENTS THE DREGS RISE.

The Israelites did not limit their struggles to the dark conspiracy to
which allusion has been made. In some of the Moorish towns that revolted
from Ferdinand, they renounced the neutrality they had hitherto