with a sweet confusion: and highly
pleased I was to find it contained only innocence and duty to the
deceased mistress, and the loving parents, expressing her joy that,
in the midst of her grief for losing the one, she was not obliged
to return to be a burden to the other; and I gave it her again, with
words of encouragement, and went down much better satisfied than I had
been with her correspondence.

"But when I reflected upon the innocent simplicity of her style, I was
still more in love with her, and formed a stratagem, and succeeded in
it, to come at her other letters, which I sent forward, after I had
read them, all but three or four, which I kept back, when my plot
began to ripen for execution; although the little slut was most
abominably free with my character to her parents.

"You will censure me, no doubt, that my mother's injunctions made not
a more lasting impression. But really I struggled hard with myself
to give them their due force: and the dear girl, as I said, every day
grew lovelier, and more accomplished. Her letters were but so many
links to the chains in which she had bound me; and though once I
had resolved to part with her to Lady Davers, and you, Madam, had
an intention to take her, I could not for my life give her up; and
thinking more honourably then of the state of a mistress than I have
done since, I could not persuade myself (since I intended to do as
handsomely by her as ever man did to a lady in that situation) but
that I should do better for her than my mother had wished me to do,
and so _more_ than answer all her injunctions, as to the providing
for her: and I could not imagine I should meet with a resistance I had
seldom encountered from persons much her superiors as to descent; and
was amazed at it; for it confounded me in all the notions I had of
her sex, which, like a true libertine, I supposed wanted nothing but
_importunity_ and _opportunity_, a bold attempter, and a mind not
ungenerous. Sometimes I admired her for her virtue; at other times,
impetuous in my temper, and unused to control, I could have beat her.
She well, I remember, describes the tumults of my soul, repeating what
once passed between us, in words like, these:--'Take the little
witch from me, Mrs. Jervis.--I can neither bear, nor forbear her--But
stay-you shan't go--Yet be gone!--No, come back again.'--She thought I
was mad, she says in her papers. Indeed I was little less. She says,
I took her arm, and griped it