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ence above-mentioned; but unluckily, one of the company having been bred to physic, urged permission to see her, in order to prescribe some recipe for her ailment.--Natura was now extremely at a loss what to do, till the minister, who never wanted an expedient, relieved him, by telling the doctor, that his neice had been accustomed to these kind of fits from her infancy, that it was only silence and repose which recovered her, which being now gone to take, any interruption would be of more prejudice than benefit. This passed very well, and no farther mention was made of her; but the accident occasioned the company to take leave much sooner than otherwise they would have done, very much to the ease of Natura, who had been in the most intolerable constraint, to behave so as to conceal the truth, and longed to be alone, to give a loose to the distracting passions of his soul. The more he ruminated on the wrongs he had sustained, the more difficult he found it to preserve that moderation the minister had enjoined, and he had promised: he had long but too much reason to believe his wife was false; but the thought that she had entered into a criminal conversation with his own brother, rendered the guilt doubly odious in them both.--Had not his own eyes convinced him of the horrid truth, he could have given credit to no other testimony, that a brother, whom he had always treated with the utmost affection, and whose fortune it had been his care to promote, should have dared to harbour even the most distant wish of dishonouring his wife. He seemed, in his eyes, the most culpable of the two, and thought the banishment intended for him much too small a punishment for so atrocious a crime. It is certain that this young gentleman had not only broke through the bands of duty, honour, gratitude, and every social obligation, but had also sinned against nature itself, by adding incest to adultery.--Natura could not indeed consider him as any thing but a monster, and that as such he ought to be cut off from the face of the earth; and neither reason nor humanity, could alledge any thing against the dictates of a revenge, which by the most unconcerned and disinterested person could not be called unjust.--Strongly did its emotions work within his soul, and he was more than once on the point of going in search of him, in order to satiate its most impatient thirst, but was as often restrained, by reflecting on the consequences.--'Suppose,
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