only cheerful, but
merry; and so he pressed me to be.

I told him I had a great deal of reason to be merry, seeing he had been
so kind to me, and had given me hopes of recovering me from the worst
circumstances that ever woman of any sort of fortune was sunk into; that
he could not but believe that what he had said to me was like life from
the dead; that it was like recovering one sick from the brink of the
grave; how I should ever make him a return any way suitable was what I
had not yet had time to think of; I could only say that I should never
forget it while I had life, and should be always ready to acknowledge
it.

He said that was all he desired of me; that his reward would be the
satisfaction of having rescued me from misery; that he found he was
obliging one that knew what gratitude meant; that he would make it his
business to make me completely easy, first or last, if it lay in his
power; and in the meantime he bade me consider of anything that I
thought he might do for me, for my advantage, and in order to make me
perfectly easy.

After we had talked thus, he bade me be cheerful. "Come," says he, "lay
aside these melancholy things, and let us be merry." Amy waited at the
table, and she smiled and laughed, and was so merry she could hardly
contain it, for the girl loved me to an excess hardly to be described;
and it was such an unexpected thing to hear any one talk to her
mistress, that the wench was beside herself almost, and, as soon as
dinner was over, Amy went upstairs, and put on her best clothes too, and
came down dressed like a gentlewoman.

We sat together talking of a thousand things--of what had been, and what
was to be--all the rest of the day, and in the evening he took his
leave of me, with a thousand expressions of kindness and tenderness and
true affection to me, but offered not the least of what my maid Amy had
suggested.

At his going away he took me in his arms, protested an honest kindness
to me; said a thousand kind things to me, which I cannot now recollect;
and, after kissing me twenty times or thereabouts, put a guinea into my
hand, which, he said, was for my present supply, and told me that he
would see me again before it was out; also he gave Amy half-a-crown.

When he was gone, "Well, Amy," said I, "are you convinced now that he is
an honest as well as a true friend, and that there has been nothing, not
the least appearance of anything, of what you imagined in his
behaviour?"