ndeavour to reconcile us together again, and
restore our mutual comfort and family peace; that we might lie as we
used to do together, and so let the whole matter remain a secret as
close as death. 'For, child,' says she, 'we are both undone if it
comes out.'

To encourage me to this, she promised to make me easy in my
circumstances, as far as she was able, and to leave me what she could
at her death, secured for me separately from my husband; so that if it
should come out afterwards, I should not be left destitute, but be able
to stand on my own feet and procure justice from him.

This proposal did not agree at all with my judgment of the thing,
though it was very fair and kind in my mother; but my thoughts ran
quite another way.

As to keeping the thing in our own breasts, and letting it all remain
as it was, I told her it was impossible; and I asked her how she could
think I could bear the thoughts of lying with my own brother. In the
next place, I told her that her being alive was the only support of the
discovery, and that while she owned me for her child, and saw reason to
be satisfied that I was so, nobody else would doubt it; but that if she
should die before the discovery, I should be taken for an impudent
creature that had forged such a thing to go away from my husband, or
should be counted crazed and distracted. Then I told her how he had
threatened already to put me into a madhouse, and what concern I had
been in about it, and how that was the thing that drove me to the
necessity of discovering it to her as I had done.

From all which I told her, that I had, on the most serious reflections
I was able to make in the case, come to this resolution, which I hoped
she would like, as a medium between both, viz. that she should use her
endeavours with her son to give me leave to go to England, as I had
desired, and to furnish me with a sufficient sum of money, either in
goods along with me, or in bills for my support there, all along
suggesting that he might one time or other think it proper to come over
to me.

That when I was gone, she should then, in cold blood, and after first
obliging him in the solemnest manner possible to secrecy, discover the
case to him, doing it gradually, and as her own discretion should guide
her, so that he might not be surprised with it, and fly out into any
passions and excesses on my account, or on hers; and that she should
concern herself to prevent his slighting the chil