l be to your
satisfaction too.'

'So it is,' says I, 'one way; but this does not reach my case at all,
nor is this the chief thing that troubles me, though I have been
concerned about that too.' 'What is it, then?' says he. With which I
fell to tears, and could say nothing to him at all. He strove to
pacify me all he could, but began at last to be very pressing upon me
to tell what it was. At last I answered that I thought I ought to tell
him too, and that he had some right to know it; besides, that I wanted
his direction in the case, for I was in such perplexity that I knew not
what course to take, and then I related the whole affair to him. I
told him how imprudently his brother had managed himself, in making
himself so public; for that if he had kept it a secret, as such a thing
out to have been, I could but have denied him positively, without
giving any reason for it, and he would in time have ceased his
solicitations; but that he had the vanity, first, to depend upon it
that I would not deny him, and then had taken the freedom to tell his
resolution of having me to the whole house.

I told him how far I had resisted him, and told him how sincere and
honourable his offers were. 'But,' says I, 'my case will be doubly
hard; for as they carry it ill to me now, because he desires to have
me, they'll carry it worse when they shall find I have denied him; and
they will presently say, there's something else in it, and then out it
comes that I am married already to somebody else, or that I would never
refuse a match so much above me as this was.'

This discourse surprised him indeed very much. He told me that it was
a critical point indeed for me to manage, and he did not see which way
I should get out of it; but he would consider it, and let me know next
time we met, what resolution he was come to about it; and in the
meantime desired I would not give my consent to his brother, nor yet
give him a flat denial, but that I would hold him in suspense a while.

I seemed to start at his saying I should not give him my consent. I
told him he knew very well I had no consent to give; that he had
engaged himself to marry me, and that my consent was the same time
engaged to him; that he had all along told me I was his wife, and I
looked upon myself as effectually so as if the ceremony had passed; and
that it was from his own mouth that I did so, he having all along
persuaded me to call myself his wife.

'Well, my dear,'