Adrianople under
circumstances of great peril and difficulty; and when he had gratified
the Eremite's curiosity respecting their Christian brethren in Paynim
lands, and sympathetically marvelled with him at the advancing fortunes
of the Crescent, Nicaeus, who perceived that Iduna stood in great need of
rest, mentioned the fatigues of his more fragile brother, and requested
permission for him to retire. Whereupon the Eremite himself, fetching a
load of fresh rushes, arranged them in one of the cells, and invited the
fair Iduna to repose. The daughter of Hunniades, first humbling herself
before the altar of the Virgin, and offering her gratitude for all the
late mercies vouchsafed unto her, and then bidding a word of peace to
her host and her companion, withdrew to her hard-earned couch, soon was
buried in a sleep as sweet and innocent as herself.

But repose fell not upon the eye-lids of Nicaeus in spite of all labours.
The heart of the Athenian Prince was distracted by two most powerful of
passions--Love and Jealousy--and when the Eremite, pointing out to his
guest his allotted resting-place, himself retired to his regular and
simple slumbers, Nicaeus quitted the cavern, and standing upon the bank
of the river, gazed in abstraction upon the rushing waters foaming in
the moonlight. The Prince of Athens, with many admirable qualities, was
one of those men who are influenced only by their passions, and who, in
the affairs of life, are invariably guided by their imagination instead
of their reason. At present all thought and feeling, all considerations,
and all circumstances, merged in the overpowering love he entertained
for Iduna, his determination to obtain her at all cost and peril, and
his resolution that she should never again meet Iskander, except as the
wife of Nicaeus. Compared with this paramount object, the future seemed
to vanish. The emancipation of his country, the welfare of his friend,
even the maintenance of his holy creed, all those great and noble
objects for which, under other circumstances, he would have been
prepared to sacrifice his fortune and his life, no longer interested or
influenced him; and while the legions of the Crescent were on the point
of pouring into Greece to crush that patriotic and Christian cause
over which Iskander and himself had so often mused, whose interests the
disinterested absence of Iskander, occasioned solely by his devotion to
Nicaeus, had certainly endangered, and perhaps,