uestions:

1. Whether you wrote a letter, dated, as I have a memorandum, Wedn. June
7, congratulating your nephew Lovelace on his supposed nuptials, as
reported to you by Mr. Spurrier, your Ladyship's steward, as from one
Captain Tomlinson:--and in it reproaching Mr. Lovelace, as guilty of
slight, &c. in not having acquainted your Ladyship and the family
with his marriage?

2. Whether your ladyship wrote to Miss Montague to meet you at Reading,
in order to attend you to your cousin Leeson's, in Albemarle-street;
on your being obliged to be in town on your old chancery affair, I
remember are the words? and whether you bespoke your nephew's
attendance there on Sunday night the 11th?

3. Whether your Ladyship and Miss Montague did come to town at that
time; and whether you went to Hampstead, on Monday, in a hired coach
and four, your own being repairing, and took from thence to town with
the young creature whom you visited there?

Your Ladyship will probably guess, that the questions are not asked for
reasons favourable to your nephew Lovelace. But be the answer what it
will, it can do him no hurt, nor me any good; only that I think I owe it
to my former hopes, (however deceived in them,) and even to charity, that
a person, of whom I was once willing to think better, should not prove so
egregiously abandoned, as to be wanting, in every instance, to that
veracity which is indispensable in the character of a gentleman.

Be pleased, Madam, to direct to me, (keeping the direction a secret for
the present,) to be left at the Belle-Savage, on Ludgate hill, till
called for. I am

Your Ladyship's most humble servant,
CLARISSA HARLOWE.

LETTER LVIII

LADY BETTY LAWRANCE, TO MISS CL. HARLOWE
SATURDAY, JULY 1.

DEAR MADAM,

I find that all is not as it should be between you and my nephew
Lovelace. It will very much afflict me, and all his friends, if he has
been guilty of any designed baseness to a lady of your character and
merit.

We have been long in expectation of an opportunity to congratulate you
and ourselves upon an event most earnestly wished for by us all; since
our hopes of him are built upon the power you have over him: for if ever
man adored a woman, he is that man, and you, Madam, are that woman.

Miss Montague, in her last letter to me, in answer to one of mine,
inquiring if she knew from him whether he could call you his, or was
likely soon t