He hastily put by the letter. 'Let me rather ask,' he cried, half smiling, 'what you will say to Me?--Will you not let me know something of your history,--your situation,--your family,--your name? The deepest interest occasions my demand, my inquietude.--Can it offend you?'
Ellis, trembling, looking down, and involuntarily sighing, in a faltering voice, answered, 'Have I not besought you, Sir, to spare me upon this subject? Have I not conjured you, if you value my peace,--nay, my honour!--what can I say more solemn?--to drop it for ever more?'
'Why this dreadful language?' cried Harleigh, with mingled impatience and grief: 'Can the impression of a cumpulsatory engagement--or what other may be the mystery that it envelopes? Will you not be generous enough to relieve a perplexity that now tortures me? Is it too much for a man lost to himself for your sake,--lost he knows not how,--knows not to whom,--to be indulged with some little explanation, where, and how, he has placed all his hopes?--Is this too much to ask?'
'Too much?' repeated Ellis, with quickness: 'O no! no! Were my confidence to depend upon my sense of what I owe to your generous esteem, your noble trust in a helpless Wanderer,--known to you solely through your benevolence,--were my opinion--and my gratitude my guides,--it would be difficult, indeed, to say what enquiries you could make, that I could refuse to satisfy;--what you could ask, that I ought not to answer! but alas!--'
She hesitated: heightened blushes dyed her cheeks; and she visibly struggled to restrain herself from bursting into tears.
Touched, delighted, yet affrighted, Harleigh tenderly demanded, 'O, why resist the generous impulse, that would plead for some little frankness, in favour of one who unreservedly devotes to you his whole existence?'
Suddenly now, as if self-alarmed, checking her sensibility, she gravely cried, 'What would it avail that I should enter into any particulars of my situation, when what has so recently passed, makes all that has preceded immaterial? You have heard my promise to Miss Joddrel,--you see by this letter how direfully she meditates to watch its performance;--'
'And can you suffer the wild flights of a revolutionary enthusiast, impelled by every extravagant new system of the moment;--however you may pity her feelings, respect her purity, and make allowance for her youth, to blight every fair prospect of a rational attachment? to supersede every right? and to annihilate all consideration, all humanity, but for herself?'