'What is it,' cried Harleigh, inexpressibly alarmed, 'what is it Elinor means?'
'To re-conquer, by the courage of my death, the esteem I may leave forfeited by my jealousy, my envy, my littleness in life! You only could have corrected my errours; you, by your ascendance over my feelings, might have refined them into virtues. Oh, Harleigh! weigh not alone my imperfections when you recollect my attachment! but remember that I have loved you so as woman never loved!'
Her voice now faultered, and she shook so violently that she could not support herself. She put her hand gently upon the arm of Harleigh, and, gliding nearly behind him, leant upon his shoulder. He would have spoken words of comfort, but she seemed incapable of hearing him. 'Farewell!' she cried, 'Harleigh! Never will I live to see Ellis your's!—Farewell!—a long farewell!'
Precipitately she then opened the shagreen case, and was drawing out its contents, when Ellis, darting forward, caught her arm, and screamed, rather than articulated, 'Ellis will never be his!—Forbear! Forbear!—Ellis never will be his!'
The astonished Harleigh, who, hitherto, had rigorously avoided meeting the eyes of Ellis, now turned towards her, with an expression in which all that was not surprise was resentment; while Elinor, seeming suddenly suspended, faintly pronounced, 'Ellis—deluding Ellis!—what is it you say?'
'I am no deluder!' cried Ellis, yet more eagerly: 'Rely, rely upon my plighted honour!'
Harleigh now looked utterly confounded; but Ellis only saw, and seemed only to breathe for Elinor, who recovering, as if by miracle, her complexion, her voice, and the brightness of her eyes, rapturously exclaimed, 'Oh Harleigh!—Is there, then, sympathy in our fate? Do you, too, love in vain?'—And, from a change of emotion, too sudden and too mighty for the shattered state of her nerves, she sunk senseless upon the floor.
The motive to the strange protestations of Ellis was now apparent: a poniard dropt from the hand of Elinor as she fell, of which, while she spoke her farewell, Ellis had caught a glance.
Harleigh seemed himself to require the aid that he was called upon to bestow. He looked at Elinor with a mixture of compassion and horrour, and, taking possession of the poniard, 'Unhappy Elinor!' he cried, 'into what a chaos of errour and of crime have these fatal new systems bewildered thee!'
The revival of Elinor was almost immediate; and though, at first, she seemed to have lost the remembrance of what had happened, the sight of Ellis and Harleigh soon brought it back. She looked from one to the other, as if searching her destiny; and then, with quick impatience, though somewhat checked by shame, cried, 'Ellis! have you not mocked me?'