monster if she did not go away.[11]
Angelica, saying that she would lose her life rather than displease him,
descended from the beam; and having given the monster a cake of wax which
fastened up his teeth, and then caught and fixed him in a set of nooses
she had brought for that purpose, took her miserable departure. Rinaldo
upon this got down from the beam himself; and having succeeded, though
with the greatest difficulty, in beating and squeezing the life out of
the monster, dealt such havoc among the people of the castle who
assailed him, that the horrible old woman, whose crimes had made her the
creature's housekeeper, and led her to take delight in its cruelty, threw
herself headlong from a tower. The Paladin then took his way forth,
turning his back on the castle and the sea-shore.
Angelica returned to the capital of her father's dominion, Albracca; and
the pertinacity of others in seeking her love being as great as that of
hers for Rinaldo, she found King Galafron, in a short time, besieged
there for her sake, by the fierce Agrican, king of Tartary.
In a short time a jealous feud sprang up between the loving friends
Rinaldo and Orlando; and Angelica, torn with conflicting emotions, from
her dread on her father's account as well as her own, and her aversion
to every knight but her detester, was at one time compelled to apply to
Orlando for assistance, and at another, being afraid that he would have
the better of Rinaldo in combat, to send him away on a perilous adventure
elsewhere, with a promise of accepting his love should he succeed.[12]
Orlando went, but not before he had slain Agrican and delivered Albracca.
Circumstances, however, again took him with her to a distance, as the
reader will see, ere he could bring her to perform her promise; and the
Paladins in general having again been scattered abroad, it happened that
Rinaldo a second time found himself in the forest of Arden; and here,
without expecting it, he became an altered man; for he now tasted a very
different stream from that which had given him his hate for Angelica;
namely, the one which had made her fall in love with himself. He was led
to do this by a very extraordinary adventure.
In the thick of the forest he had come upon a mead full of flowers, in
which there was a naked youth, singing in the midst of three damsels, who
were naked also, and who were dancing round about him. They had bunches
of flowers in their hands, and garlands on the
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