“What is the matter, dearest?” said I, following her into another apartment: “you seem sad, and your eyes are red with tears, which are not, methinks, entirely the tears of joy at this happy change in your father.”
“I am marked out for suffering,” returned Isora, more keenly than she was wont to speak. I pressed her to explain her meaning; she hesitated at first, but at length confessed that her father had always been anxious for her marriage with this soi-disant Barnard, and that his first words on his recovery had been to press her to consent to his wishes.
“My poor father,” said she, weepingly, “speaks and thinks only for my fancied good; but his senses as yet are only recovered in part, and he cannot even understand me when I speak of you. ‘I shall die,’ he said, ‘I shall die, and you will be left on the wide world!’ I in vain endeavoured to explain to him that I should have a protector: he fell asleep muttering those words, and with tears in his eyes.”
“Does he know as much of this Barnard as you do?” said I.
“Heavens, no!—or he would never have pressed me to marry one so wicked.”
“Does he know even who he is?”
“Yes!” said Isora, after a pause; “but he has not known it long.”
Here the physician joined us, and taking me aside, informed me that, as he had foreboded, sleep had been the harbinger of death, and that Don Diego was no more. I broke the news as gently as I could to Isora: but her grief was far more violent than I could have anticipated; and nothing seemed to cut her so deeply to the heart as the thought that his last wish had been one with which she had not complied, and could never comply.
I pass over the first days of mourning: I come to the one after Don Diego’s funeral. I had been with Isora in the morning; I left her for a few hours, and returned at the first dusk of evening with some books and music, which I vainly hoped she might recur to for a momentary abstraction from her grief. I dismissed my carriage, with the intention of walking home, and addressing the woman-servant who admitted me, inquired, as was my wont, after Isora. “She has been very ill,” replied the woman, “ever since the strange gentleman left her.”
“The strange gentleman?”