Page:Duty and Inclination. Volume 3.pdf/4

2 In secret she gave herself up to excessive sorrow,—portrayed in her imagination the frightful image of the dissolution of him to whom her affections had been so long linked in sweet connexion. Unhappy Oriana! wrapt in silent woe or in murmuring sounds, wild and frantic, nought could assuage her grief but the persuasion that if Philimore died she would not long survive him: "That moment," she exclaimed, "which consigns him to the tomb, will also strike the fatal blow at me! Death will be welcome, it will end a life that would be miserable without him!"

The physician who had been called to attend upon Philimore did not hesitate to pronounce his complaint an affection of the lungs; softening, however the case to his parents, by assuring them that he did not entertain any immediate fears of danger.

Philimore had dreaded nothing so much as that the intelligence of his illness should reach Oriana; the idea of the anguish she would suffer on his account seeming worse a thousand times than the acute bodily pain he endured.

From a second and third messenger, however, Oriana had each time the satisfaction of hearing that her Philimore was better; and she became still more solaced by the hope of again receiving his invaluable letters as soon as an improved state of convalescence would enable him to write; she having experienced no difficulty in receiving his communications, which were often delivered even in the presence of her aunt, who never, by the slightest curiosity, expressed a