e this with such moving
eloquence that it forced tears from her; but she was obliged to say that
she neither knew where I was gone or how to write to me; but that if she
did ever see me again she would not fail to give me an account of all
she had said to her, or that she should yet think fit to say, and to
take my answer to it, if I thought fit to give any.

Then the Quaker took the freedom to ask a few particulars about this
wonderful story, as she called it; at which the girl, beginning at the
first distresses of my life, and indeed of her own, went through all the
history of her miserable education, her service under the Lady Roxana,
as she called me, and her relief by Mrs. Amy, with the reasons she had
to believe that as Amy owned herself to be the same that lived with her
mother, and especially that Amy was the Lady Roxana's maid too, and came
out of France with her, she was by those circumstances, and several
others in her conversation, as fully convinced that the Lady Roxana was
her mother, as she was that the Lady ---- at her house (the Quaker's)
was the very same Roxana that she had been servant to.

My good friend the Quaker, though terribly shocked at the story, and not
well knowing what to say, yet was too much my friend to seem convinced
in a thing which she did not know to be true, and which, if it was true,
she could see plainly I had a mind should not be known; so she turned
her discourse to argue the girl out of it. She insisted upon the slender
evidence she had of the fact itself, and the rudeness of claiming so
near a relation of one so much above her, and of whose concern in it she
had no knowledge, at least no sufficient proof; that as the lady at her
house was a person above any disguises, so she could not believe that
she would deny her being her daughter, if she was really her mother;
that she was able sufficiently to have provided for her if she had not a
mind to have her known; and, therefore, seeing she had heard all she had
said of the Lady Roxana, and was so far from owning herself to be the
person, so she had censured that sham lady as a cheat and a common
woman; and that 'twas certain she could never be brought to own a name
and character she had so justly exposed.

Besides, she told her that her lodger, meaning me, was not a sham lady,
but the real wife of a knight-baronet; and that she knew her to be
honestly such, and far above such a person as she had described. She
then added that