ich I am an utter
stranger. I have a right, sir, to demand of your honour, that you will
not impute to me your breaking off a connexion, which--I would--rather
wish--had never"----"Heaven and earth! what do I hear?" cried our
impatient knight; "have I not the baleful letter to produce? What else
but Miss Darnel's explicit and express declaration could have destroyed
the sweetest hope that ever cheered my soul; could have obliged me to
resign all claim to that felicity for which alone I wished to live; could
have filled my bosom with unutterable sorrow and despair; could have even
divested me of reason, and driven me from the society of men, a poor,
forlorn, wandering lunatic, such as you see me now prostrate at your
feet; all the blossoms of my youth withered, all the honours of my family
decayed?"

Aurelia looking wishfully at her lover, "Sir," said she, "you overwhelm
me with amazement and anxiety! you are imposed upon, if you have received
any such letter. You are deceived, if you thought Aurelia Darnel could
be so insensible, ungrateful, and--inconstant."

This last word she pronounced with some hesitation, and a downcast look,
while her face underwent a total suffusion, and the knight's heart began
to palpitate with all the violence of emotion. He eagerly imprinted a
kiss upon her hand, exclaiming, in interrupted phrase, "Can it be
possible?--Heaven grant--Sure this is no illusion!--O madam!--shall I
call you my Aurelia? My heart is bursting with a thousand fond thoughts
and presages. You shall see that dire paper which has been the source of
all my woes--it is the constant companion of my travels--last night I
nourished my chagrin with the perusal of its horrid contents."

Aurelia expressed great impatience to view the cruel forgery, for such
she assured him it must be. But he could not gratify her desire, till
the arrival of his servant with the portmanteau. In the meantime, tea
was called. The lovers were seated. He looked and languished; she
flushed and faltered. All was doubt and delirium, fondness and flutter.
Their mutual disorder communicated itself to the kind-hearted
sympathising Dolly, who had been witness to the interview, and deeply
affected at the disclosure of the scene. Unspeakable was her surprise,
when she found her mistress, Miss Meadows, was no other than the
celebrated Aurelia Darnel, whose eulogium she had heard so eloquently
pronounced by her sweetheart, Mr. Thomas Clarke; a dis