sessed it has injured me; does that alter its value as a
medium of exchange? He will boast, perhaps of the imaginary obligation
he has conferred on me: surely to shrink from a thing in itself right
from any such apprehension, can be the result only of pusillanimity and
cowardice!

CHAPTER XIII.

Influenced by these reasonings, I determined to retain what had thus
been put into my hands. My next care was in regard to the scene I should
choose, as the retreat of that life which I had just saved from the
grasp of the executioner. The danger to which I was exposed of forcible
interruption in my pursuits, was probably, in some respects, less now
than it had been previously to this crisis. Besides, that I was
considerably influenced in this deliberation by the strong loathing I
conceived for the situations in which I had lately been engaged. I knew
not in what mode Mr. Falkland intended to exercise his vengeance against
me; but I was seized with so unconquerable an aversion to disguise, and
the idea of spending my life in personating a fictitious character, that
I could not, for the present at least, reconcile my mind to any thing of
that nature. The same kind of disgust I had conceived for the
metropolis, where I had spent so many hours of artifice, sadness, and
terror. I therefore decided in favour of the project which had formerly
proved amusing to my imagination, of withdrawing to some distant, rural
scene, a scene of calmness and obscurity, where for a few years at
least, perhaps during the life of Mr. Falkland, I might be hidden from
the world, recover the wounds my mind had received in this fatal
connection, methodise and improve the experience which had been
accumulated, cultivate the faculties I in any degree possessed, and
employ the intervals of these occupations in simple industry, and the
intercourse of guileless, uneducated, kind-intentioned minds. The
menaces of my persecutor seemed to forebode the inevitable interruption
of this system. But I deemed it wise to put these menaces out of my
consideration I compared them to death, which must infallibly overtake
us we know not when; but the possibility of whose arrival next year,
next week, to-morrow, must be left out of the calculation of him who
would enter upon any important or well-concerted undertaking.

Such were the ideas that determined my choice. Thus did my youthful mind
delineate the system of distant years, even when the threats of instant
ca