nd that he intended to marry me; that it was true his father and
mother might resent it, and be unkind, but that he was now in a way to
live, being bred to the law, and he did not fear maintaining me
agreeable to what I should expect; and that, in short, as he believed I
would not be ashamed of him, so he was resolved not to be ashamed of
me, and that he scorned to be afraid to own me now, whom he resolved to
own after I was his wife, and therefore I had nothing to do but to give
him my hand, and he would answer for all the rest.

I was now in a dreadful condition indeed, and now I repented heartily
my easiness with the eldest brother; not from any reflection of
conscience, but from a view of the happiness I might have enjoyed, and
had now made impossible; for though I had no great scruples of
conscience, as I have said, to struggle with, yet I could not think of
being a whore to one brother and a wife to the other. But then it came
into my thoughts that the first brother had promised to made me his
wife when he came to his estate; but I presently remembered what I had
often thought of, that he had never spoken a word of having me for a
wife after he had conquered me for a mistress; and indeed, till now,
though I said I thought of it often, yet it gave me no disturbance at
all, for as he did not seem in the least to lessen his affection to me,
so neither did he lessen his bounty, though he had the discretion
himself to desire me not to lay out a penny of what he gave me in
clothes, or to make the least show extraordinary, because it would
necessarily give jealousy in the family, since everybody know I could
come at such things no manner of ordinary way, but by some private
friendship, which they would presently have suspected.

But I was now in a great strait, and knew not what to do. The main
difficulty was this: the younger brother not only laid close siege to
me, but suffered it to be seen. He would come into his sister's room,
and his mother's room, and sit down, and talk a thousand kind things of
me, and to me, even before their faces, and when they were all there.
This grew so public that the whole house talked of it, and his mother
reproved him for it, and their carriage to me appeared quite altered.
In short, his mother had let fall some speeches, as if she intended to
put me out of the family; that is, in English, to turn me out of doors.
Now I was sure this could not be a secret to his brother, only that h