ould I now be backward to see him! Well,
while I was in this hurry my friend the Quaker comes up again, and
perceiving the confusion I was in, she runs to her closet and fetched me
a little pleasant cordial; but I would not taste it. "Oh," says she, "I
understand thee. Be not uneasy; I'll give thee something shall take off
all the smell of it; if he kisses thee a thousand times he shall be no
wiser." I thought to myself, "Thou art perfectly acquainted with affairs
of this nature; I think you must govern me now;" so I began to incline
to go down with her. Upon that I took the cordial, and she gave me a
kind of spicy preserve after it, whose flavour was so strong, and yet so
deliciously pleasant, that it would cheat the nicest smelling, and it
left not the least taint of the cordial on the breath.

Well, after this, though with some hesitation still, I went down a pair
of back-stairs with her, and into a dining-room, next to the parlour in
which he was; but there I halted, and desired she would let me consider
of it a little. "Well, do so," says she, and left me with more readiness
than she did before. "Do consider, and I'll come to thee again."

Though I hung back with an awkwardness that was really unfeigned, yet
when she so readily left me I thought it was not so kind, and I began to
think she should have pressed me still on to it; so foolishly backward
are we to the thing which, of all the world, we most desire; mocking
ourselves with a feigned reluctance, when the negative would be death to
us. But she was too cunning for me; for while I, as it were, blamed her
in my mind for not carrying me to him, though, at the same time, I
appeared backward to see him, on a sudden she unlocks the folding-doors,
which looked into the next parlour, and throwing them open. "There,"
says she (ushering him in), "is the person who, I suppose, thou
inquirest for;" and the same moment, with a kind decency, she retired,
and that so swift that she would not give us leave hardly to know which
way she went.

I stood up, but was confounded with a sudden inquiry in my thoughts how
I should receive him, and with a resolution as swift as lightning, in
answer to it, said to myself, "It shall be coldly." So on a sudden I put
on an air of stiffness and ceremony, and held it for about two minutes;
but it was with great difficulty.

He restrained himself too, on the other hand, came towards me gravely,
and saluted me in form; but it was, it seems,