ward part, before she would trust herself with the
excessive joy of looking within.

At length the seal was broken--but the contents still a secret. Poor
Agnes had learned to write as some youths learn Latin: so short a time
had been allowed for the acquirement, and so little expert had been her
master, that it took her generally a week to write a letter of ten lines,
and a month to read one of twenty. But this being a letter on which her
mind was deeply engaged, her whole imagination aided her slender
literature, and at the end of a fortnight she had made out every word.
They were these--

"Dr. Agnes,--I hope you have been well since we parted--I have been
very well myself; but I have been teased with a great deal of
business, which has not given me time to write to you before. I have
been called to the bar, which engages every spare moment; but I hope
it will not prevent my coming down to Anfield with my father in the
summer.

"I am, Dr. Agnes,
"With gratitude for all the favours you
have conferred on me,
"Yours, &c.
"W. N."

To have beheld the illiterate Agnes trying for two weeks, day and night,
to find out the exact words of this letter, would have struck the
spectator with amazement, had he also understood the right, the delicate,
the nicely proper sensations with which she was affected by every
sentence it contained.

She wished it had been kinder, even for his sake who wrote it; because
she thought so well of him, and desired still to think so well, that she
was sorry at any faults which rendered him less worthy of her good
opinion. The cold civility of his letter had this effect--her clear, her
acute judgment felt it a kind of prevarication to _promise to write and
then write nothing that was hoped for_. But, enthralled by the magic of
her passion, she shortly found excuses for the man she loved, at the
expense of her own condemnation.

"He has only the fault of inconstancy," she cried; "and that has been
caused by _my_ change of conduct. Had I been virtuous still, he had
still been affectionate." Bitter reflection!

Yet there was a sentence in the letter, that, worse than all the
tenderness left out, wounded her sensibility; and she could not read the
line, _gratitude for all the favours conferred on me_, without turning
pale with horror, then kindling with indignation at the commonplace
thanks, which insultingly reminded her of her innocence given in exchange