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230 the night. He loved her; he did not disguise it from himself; he was not likely to mislead either his own mind or others by the veil of a specious sophistry; and in the freshness and the abandonment of those first hours there came the chillier memory of the bidding she had given him, to leave her and remain a stranger to her. Fear or doubt were alike alien to him. Yet, in calmer reason, he could not but remember that such words must have their motive in some cause he could not fathom; that their mere expression had been strange, and argued of mystery, if not of evil. She had spoken nothing of herself; there remained still unexplained, unguessed at, the cause she had had for the concealment of her name at Monastica, or of her presence at all in those barbaric Moldavian wilds. Who was she? What was her history? He could not tell. Not even did he know whether she were wedded or unwedded; whether his love could ever bring him any chance of happiness through it, or whether it were already forbidden and doomed to be its own misery, its own curse. He knew nothing. And alone on the hill-side, with the vulture wheeling above-head in the noon skies, and the cypress thickets stretching downward to the precipice beneath his feet, a quick shudder ran through his