society. The exceptions consisted of a few high-born females, who,

panic-struck, and tamed by sorrow, had joined him. Among these was one,

young, lovely, and enthusiastic, whose very goodness made her a more easy

victim. I have mentioned her before: Juliet, the youngest daughter, and now

sole relic of the ducal house of L---. There are some beings, whom fate

seems to select on whom to pour, in unmeasured portion, the vials of her

wrath, and whom she bathes even to the lips in misery. Such a one was the

ill-starred Juliet. She had lost her indulgent parents, her brothers and

sisters, companions of her youth; in one fell swoop they had been carried

off from her. Yet she had again dared to call herself happy; united to her

admirer, to him who possessed and filled her whole heart, she yielded to

the lethean powers of love, and knew and felt only his life and presence.

At the very time when with keen delight she welcomed the tokens of

maternity, this sole prop of her life failed, her husband died of the

plague. For a time she had been lulled in insanity; the birth of her child

restored her to the cruel reality of things, but gave her at the same time

an object for whom to preserve at once life and reason. Every friend and

relative had died off, and she was reduced to solitude and penury; deep

melancholy and angry impatience distorted her judgment, so that she could

not persuade herself to disclose her distress to us. When she heard of the

plan of universal emigration, she resolved to remain behind with her

child, and alone in wide England to live or die, as fate might decree,

beside the grave of her beloved. She had hidden herself in one of the many

empty habitations of London; it was she who rescued my Idris on the fatal

twentieth of November, though my immediate danger, and the subsequent

illness of Idris, caused us to forget our hapless friend. This circumstance

509

The Last Man