sometimes with exultation and
sometimes with malice. I left her at length, and returned to the house
not till a late hour. As soon as I entered, my father presented Betty to
me as his wife, and desired she might receive that treatment from me
which was due to a mother.

It was not till after repeated and solemn declarations from both of them
that I was prevailed upon to credit this event. Its effect upon my
feelings may be easily conceived. I knew the woman to be rude, ignorant,
and licentious. Had I suspected this event, I might have fortified my
father's weakness and enabled him to shun the gulf to which he was
tending; but my presumption had been careless of the danger. To think
that such a one should take the place of my revered mother was
intolerable.

To treat her in any way not squaring with her real merits; to hinder
anger and scorn from rising at the sight of her in her new condition,
was not in my power. To be degraded to the rank of her servant, to
become the sport of her malice and her artifices, was not to be endured.
I had no independent provision; but I was the only child of my father,
and had reasonably hoped to succeed to his patrimony. On this hope I had
built a thousand agreeable visions. I had meditated innumerable projects
which the possession of this estate would enable me to execute. I had no
wish beyond the trade of agriculture, and beyond the opulence which a
hundred acres would give.

These visions were now at an end. No doubt her own interest would be, to
this woman, the supreme law, and this would be considered as
irreconcilably hostile to mine. My father would easily be moulded to
her purpose, and that act easily extorted from him which should reduce
me to beggary. She had a gross and perverse taste. She had a numerous
kindred, indigent and hungry. On these his substance would speedily be
lavished. Me she hated, because she was conscious of having injured me,
because she knew that I held her in contempt, and because I had detected
her in an illicit intercourse with the son of a neighbour.

The house in which I lived was no longer my own, nor even my father's.
Hitherto I had thought and acted in it with the freedom of a master; but
now I was become, in my own conceptions, an alien and an enemy to the
roof under which I was born. Every tie which had bound me to it was
dissolved or converted into something which repelled me to a distance
from it. I was a guest whose presence was borne with