entleman who had a plantation near mine; and
though I was legally free to marry, as to any obligation that was on me
before, yet that I was shy of it, lest the blot should some time or
other be revived, and it might make a husband uneasy. My son, the same
kind, dutiful, and obliging creature as ever, treated me now at his own
house, paid me my hundred pounds, and sent me home again loaded with
presents.

Some time after this, I let my son know I was married, and invited him
over to see us, and my husband wrote a very obliging letter to him
also, inviting him to come and see him; and he came accordingly some
months after, and happened to be there just when my cargo from England
came in, which I let him believe belonged all to my husband's estate,
not to me.

It must be observed that when the old wretch my brother (husband) was
dead, I then freely gave my husband an account of all that affair, and
of this cousin, as I had called him before, being my own son by that
mistaken unhappy match. He was perfectly easy in the account, and told
me he should have been as easy if the old man, as we called him, had
been alive. 'For,' said he, 'it was no fault of yours, nor of his; it
was a mistake impossible to be prevented.' He only reproached him with
desiring me to conceal it, and to live with him as a wife, after I knew
that he was my brother; that, he said, was a vile part. Thus all these
difficulties were made easy, and we lived together with the greatest
kindness and comfort imaginable.

We are grown old; I am come back to England, being almost seventy years
of age, husband sixty-eight, having performed much more than the
limited terms of my transportation; and now, notwithstanding all the
fatigues and all the miseries we have both gone through, we are both of
us in good heart and health. My husband remained there some time after
me to settle our affairs, and at first I had intended to go back to
him, but at his desire I altered that resolution, and he is come over
to England also, where we resolve to spend the remainder of our years
in sincere penitence for the wicked lives we have lived.

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1683

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the
Famous Moll Flanders &c., by Daniel Defoe

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOLL FLANDERS ***

***** This file should be named 370.txt or 370.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be