In the mean time, Almeida, who had been conveyed to an apartment in ALMORAN’S seraglio, and delivered to the care of those who attended upon his women, suffered all that grief and terror could inflict upon a generous, a tender, and a delicate mind; yet in this complicated distress, her attention was principally fixed upon Hamet.  The disappointment of his hope, and the violation of his right, were the chief objects of her regret and her fears, in all that had already happened, and in all that was still to come; every insult that might be offered to herself, she considered as an injury to him.  Yet the thoughts of all that he might suffer in her person, gave way to her apprehensions of what might befall him in his own:  in his situation, every calamity that her imagination could conceive, was possible; her thoughts were, therefore, bewildered amidst an endless variety of dreadful images, which started up before them which way soever they were turned; and it was impossible that she could gain any certain intelligence of his fate, as the splendid prison in which she was now confined, was surrounded by mutes and eunuchs, of whom nothing could be learned, or in whole report no confidence could be placed.

While her mind was in this state of agitation and distress, she perceived the door open, and the next moment Almoran entered the apartment.  When she saw him, she turned from him with a look of unutterable anguish; and hiding her face in her veil, she burst into tears.  The tyrant was moved with her distress; for unfeeling obduracy is the vice only of the old, whose sensibility has been worn away by the habitual perpetration of reiterated wrongs.

He approached her with looks of kindness, and his voice was involuntarily modulated to pity; she was, however, too much absorbed in her own sorrows, to reply.  He gazed upon her with tenderness and admiration; and taking her hand into his own, he pressed it ardently to his bosom:  his compassion soon kindled into desire, and from soothing her distress, he began to solicit her love.  This instantly roused her attention, and resentment now suspended her grief:  she turned from him with a firm and haughty step, and instead of answering his professions, reproached him with her wrongs.  Almoran, that he might at once address her virtue and her passions, observed, that though he had loved her from the first moment he had seen her, yet he had concealed his passion even from her, till it had received the sanction of an invisible and superior power; that he came, therefore, the messenger of heaven; and that he offered her unrivalled empire and everlasting love.  To this she answered only by an impatient and fond enquiry after Hamet.  ’Think not of Hamet,’ said Almoran; ’for why should he who is rejected of Heaven, be still the favorite of Almeida?’ ‘If thy hand,’ said Almeida, ’could quench in everlasting darkness, that vital spark of intellectual