To the moment at which I was to receive a letter from
Veenah, my thoughts were continually and anxiously turned: and it now
seems to me as if our passion was inflamed yet more by this sort of
intercourse, than by our personal interviews. I am convinced it wrought
more powerfully upon our imaginations. In the mean time I continued my
daily attendance at college, though my studies were utterly neglected,
one single object absorbing all my thoughts and feelings.
"I know not whether the evident change in my habits induced my old
enemy, Balty Mahu, to observe my motions. But so it was, that one
moonlight night I thought I was watched by some person; and on the
following night an individual of the same figure, and whom I now
suspected to be Balty Mahu, came suddenly from a cross street, and
passed near me. A few evenings afterwards, instead of a letter, I
received a scrap of paper from Veenah, on which was written the
following words:--
"We are discovered. Balty Mahu, who is my relative and your enemy, has
been here. He has persuaded my father that you are an unbeliever. I am
denied pen and ink. If you cannot convince my father of his error, O!
pity, and try to forget, your unhappy VEENAH."
"This writing was indistinctly traced with a burnt stick, on a blank
leaf torn out of a book. In the first moment of indignation, I felt
disposed to seek Balty Mahu, the great enemy of my life, and wreak my
vengeance on him for all his persecutions; but the conviction that such
a course would extinguish the last spark of hope, restrained me.
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