id not remember me even
in his last prayer----

WAITWELL.

Pray do not torment yourself with such false notions! Your father is
still alive! He is still alive, honest Sir William!

SARA.

Is he still alive? Is it true? Is he still alive? May he live a long
while yet, and live happily! Oh, would that God would add the half of
my years to his life! Half! How ungrateful should I be, if I were not
willing to buy even a few moments for him with all the years, that may
yet be mine! But tell me at least, Waitwell, that it is not hard for
him to live without me; that it was easy to him to renounce a daughter
who could so easily renounce her virtue, that he is angry with me for
my flight, but not grieved; that he curses me, but does not mourn for
me.

WAITWELL.

Ah! Sir William is still the same fond father, as his Sara is still the
same fond daughter that she was.

SARA.

What do you say? You are a messenger of evil, of the most dreadful of
all the evils which my imagination has ever pictured to me! He is still
the same fond father? Then he loves me still? And he must mourn for me,
then! No no, he does not do so; he cannot do so? Do you not see how
infinitely each sigh which he wasted on me would magnify my crime?
Would not the justice of heaven have to charge me with every tear which
I forced from him, as if with each one I repeated my vice and my
ingratitude? I grow chill at the thought. I cause him tears? Tears? And
they are other tears than tears of joy? Contradict me, Waitwell! At
most he has felt some slight stirring of the blood on my account; some
transitory emotion, calmed by a slight effort of reason. He did not go
so far as to shed tears, surely not to shed tears, Waitwell?

WAITWELL (_wiping his eyes_).

No, Miss, he did not go so far as that.

SARA.

Alas! your lips say no, and your eyes say yes.

WAITWELL.

Take this letter Miss, it is from him himself----

SARA.

From whom? From my father? To me?

WAITWELL.

Yes, take it! You can learn more from it, than I am able to say. He
ought to have given this to another to do, not to me. I promised myself
pleasure from it; but you turn my joy into sadness.