e done to
any pretty girl I meet with." (This was, indeed, true, too true.)

"Well, well," said my father, "it is a mistake on my part."

And here the conversation on that subject was dropped.

It appeared that after the little arrangement between Mr Somerville
and my father, and when I had gone to join my ship in America, they
had had some communication together, in which Mr Somerville disclosed,
that having questioned his daughter, she had ingenuously confessed
that I was not indifferent to her. She acknowledged, with crimson
blushes, that I had requested and obtained a lock of her hair. This
Mr Somerville told my father in confidence. He was not, therefore,
at liberty to mention it to me; but it sufficiently accounts for his
astonishment at my seeming indifference; for the two worthy parents
had naturally concluded that it was a match.

Confounded and bewildered by my asseveration, my father knew not
whose veracity to impeach; but, charitably concluding there was some
mistake, or that I was, as heretofore, a fickle, thoughtless being,
considered himself bound in honour to communicate the substance of our
conversation to Mr Somerville; and the latter no sooner received it,
than he placed the letter in Emily's hands--a very comfortable kind
of _avant-courier_ for a lover, after an absence from his mistress of
full three years.

I arrived at the hall, bursting with impatience to see the lovely
girl, whose hold on my heart and affection was infinitely stronger
than I had ever supposed. Darting from the chaise, I flew into the
sitting-room, where she usually passed her morning. I was now in my
twenty-second year; my figure was decidedly of a handsome cast; my
face, what I knew most women admired. My personal advantages were
heightened by the utmost attention to dress; the society of the fair
Acadians had very much polished my manners, and I had no more of the
professional roughness of the sea than what, like the crust on the
port-wine, gave an agreeable flavour; my countenance was as open and
as ingenuous as my heart was deceitful and desperately wicked.

Emily rose with much agitation, and in an instant was clasped in my
arms: not that the movement was voluntary on her part; it was wholly
on mine. She rather recoiled; but for an instant seemed to have
forgotten the fatal communication which her father had made to her not
two hours before. She allowed me--perhaps she could not prevent it--to
press her to my heart.