ce,
for corresponding, after prohibition, with a wretch who has too well
justified all their warnings and inveteracy; and for throwing myself into
the power of your vile artifices. Let me try to secure the only hope I
have left. This is all the amends I ask of you. I repeat, therefore, Am
I now at liberty to dispose of myself as I please?

Now comes the fool, the miscreant again, hesitating his broken answer: My
dearest love, I am confounded, quite confounded, at the thought of what--
of what has been done; and at the thought of--to whom. I see, I see,
there is no withstanding your eloquence!--Such irresistible proofs of the
love of virtue, for its own sake, did I never hear of, nor meet with, in
all my reading. And if you can forgive a repentant villain, who thus on
his knees implores your forgiveness, [then down I dropt, absolutely in
earnest in all I said,] I vow by all that's sacred and just, (and may a
thunderbolt strike me dead at your feet, if I am not sincere!) that I
will by marriage before to-morrow noon, without waiting for your uncle,
or any body, do you all the justice I now can do you. And you shall ever
after controul and direct me as you please, till you have made me more
worthy of your angelic purity than now I am: nor will I presume so much
as to touch your garment, till I have the honour to call so great a
blessing lawfully mine.

O thou guileful betrayer! there is a just God, whom thou invokest: yet
the thunderbolt descends not; and thou livest to imprecate and deceive!

My dearest life! rising; for I hoped she was relenting----

Hadst thou not sinned beyond the possibility of forgiveness, interrupted
she; and this had been the first time that thus thou solemnly promisest
and invokest the vengeance thou hast as often defied; the desperateness
of my condition might have induced me to think of taking a wretched
chance with a man so profligate. But, after what I have suffered by
thee, it would be criminal in me to wish to bind my soul in covenant to
a man so nearly allied to perdition.

Good God!--how uncharitable!--I offer not to defend--would to Heaven that
I could recall--so nearly allied to perdition, Madam!--So profligate a
man, Madam!----

O how short is expression of thy crimes, and of my sufferings! Such
premeditation is thy baseness! To prostitute the characters of persons
of honour of thy own family--and all to delude a poor creature, whom thou
oughtest--But why talk I to thee?