THE RAJPOOTNI BRIDE. 
151 
roof of his family foe, he had found an opportunity to 
declare his passion for his lovely preserver. He told 
her that he had long attempted to smother it, on ac- 
count of the enmity mutually subsisting between their 
houses, but had found it impossible to do so. This 
was neither an unexpected nor unwelcome avowal. 
His young and beautiful nurse — for the daughter of 
the Hara chief had anxiously attended upon him — 
heard him therefore without surprise, but not without 
pleasure, and before he quitted her parent’s roof, their 
vows of eternal attachment had been reciprocally 
plighted. 
Although his wound had been desperate, he was 
not long in recovering, and when sufficiently strong 
to appear abroad, he made overtures to the here- 
ditary foe of his family to bestow the hand of 
his daughter upon him. The old man was roused 
to the most ferocious indignation at a proposal which 
he considered so derogatory to the pride of his 
house, bound as he was by the stern obligation of 
hereditary enmity to maintain the feud so long ex- 
isting between it and that of the Rahtore. He 
consequently rejected the proposal in terms of the 
harshest severity, at the same time reproaching the 
young warrior who had so frankly solicited an alliance 
with his family, with a breach of honour in having 
seduced the affections of his child, at a moment 
too when he was at the point of death under her 
father’s roof, and receiving all the kind offices of a 
scrupulous hospitality. This accusation was repu- 
diated with the wild indignation and keen sensibility 
of wrong peculiar to the high-spirited Rajpoot, and 
