u could
not long have deposited it before Robin took it. He rode hard, and
brought it to be just as I had risen from table.

You may justly blame me for sending my messenger empty-handed, your
situation considered; and yet that very situation (so critical!) is
partly the reason for it: for indeed I knew not what to write, fit to
send you.

I have been inquiring privately, how to procure you a conveyance from
Harlowe-place, and yet not appear in it; knowing, that to oblige in
the fact, and to disoblige in the manner, is but obliging by halves: my
mother being moreover very suspicious, and very uneasy; made more so by
daily visits from your uncle Antony; who tells her, that every thing
is now upon the point of being determined; and hopes, that her daughter
will not so interfere, as to discourage your compliance with their
wills. This I came at by a way that I cannot take notice of, or both
should hear of it in a manner neither would like: and, without that, my
mother and I have had almost hourly bickerings.

I found more difficulty than I expected (as the time was confined, and
secrecy required, and as you so earnestly forbid me to accompany you in
your enterprise) in procuring you a vehicle. Had you not obliged me to
keep measures with my mother, I could have managed it with ease. I could
even have taken our own chariot, on one pretence or other, and put two
horses extraordinary to it, if I had thought fit; and I could, when we
had got to London, have sent it back, and nobody the wiser as to the
lodgings we might have taken.

I wish to the Lord you had permitted this. Indeed I think you are too
punctilious a great deal for you situation. Would you expect to enjoy
yourself with your usual placidness, and not to be ruffled, in an
hurricane which every moment threatens to blow your house down?

Had your distress sprung from yourself, that would have been another
thing. But when all the world knows where to lay the fault, this alters
the case.

How can you say I am happy, when my mother, to her power, is as much an
abettor of their wickedness to my dearest friend, as your aunt, or any
body else?--and this through the instigation of that odd-headed and
foolish uncle of yours, who [sorry creature that he is!] keeps her up
to resolutions which are unworthy of her, for an example to me, if it
please you. Is not this cause enough for me to ground a resentment upon,
sufficient to justify me for accompanying you; the friends