Dacre, after due consideration,
enjoined silence.
In the meantime the young Duke was not in so calm a mood as Sir Lucius.
Rapidly the late extraordinary events dashed through his mind, and
already those feelings which had prompted his soliloquy in the garden
were no longer his. All forms, all images, all ideas, all memory, melted
into Miss Dacre. He felt that he loved her with a perfect love: that she
was to him what no other woman had been, even in the factitious delirium
of early passion. A thought of her seemed to bring an entirely novel
train of feelings, impressions, wishes, hopes. The world with her must
be a totally different system, and his existence in her society a new
and another life. Her very purity refined the passion which raged even
in his exhausted mind. Gleams of virtue, morning streaks of duty, broke
upon the horizon of his hitherto clouded soul; an obscure suspicion
of the utter worthlessness of his life whispered in his hollow ear;
he darkly felt that happiness was too philosophical a system to be the
result or the reward of impulse, however unbounded, and that principle
alone could create and could support that bliss which is our being's end
and aim.
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