erfect, it shall also prove me perverse?'

Here permit me to lay down my pen for a few moments.

***

You are very obliging to me, intentionally, I know, when you tell me, it
is in my power to hasten the day of Mr. Hickman's happiness. But yet,
give me leave to say, that I admire this kind assurance less than any
other paragraph of your letter.

In the first place you know it is not in my power to say when I can
dismiss my physician; and you should not put the celebration of a
marriage intended by yourself, and so desirable to your mother, upon so
precarious an issue. Nor will I accept of a compliment, which must mean
a slight to her.

If any thing could give me a relish for life, after what I have suffered,
it would be the hopes of the continuance of the more than sisterly love,
which has, for years, uninterruptedly bound us together as one mind.--And
why, my dear, should you defer giving (by a tie still stronger) another
friend to one who has so few?

I am glad you have sent my letter to Miss Montague. I hope I shall hear
no more of this unhappy man.

I had begun the particulars of my tragical story: but it is so painful a
task, and I have so many more important things to do, and, as I
apprehend, so little time to do them in, that, could I avoid it, I would
go no farther in it.

Then, to this hour, I know not by what means several of his machinations
to ruin me were brought about; so that some material parts of my sad
story must be defective, if I were to sit down to write it. But I have
been thinking of a way that will answer the end wished for by your mother
and you full as well, perhaps better.

Mr. Lovelace, it seems, had communicated to his friend Mr. Belford all
that has passed between himself and me, as he went on. Mr. Belford has
not been able to deny it. So that (as we may observe by the way) a poor
young creature, whose indiscretion has given a libertine power over her,
has a reason she little thinks of, to regret her folly; since these
wretches, who have no more honour in one point than in another, scruple
not to make her weakness a part of their triumph to their brother
libertines.

I have nothing to apprehend of this sort, if I have the justice done me
in his letters which Mr. Belford assures me I have: and therefore the
particulars of my story, and the base arts of this vile man, will, I
think, be best collected from those very letters of his, (if Mr. Belford
can be prevailed upon