a just principle before? that, however, as what I did was rather from motions of gratitude than from real weakness, however it might be construed by him, I had the satisfaction in myself of having fully discharged the debt. I added, that I had not wanted occasions of all the seeming advancements which the pretended felicity of a marriage life was usually set off with, and might have been what I desired not to name; but that, however low I had stooped to him, I had maintained the dignity of female liberty against all the attacks either of pride or avarice; and that I had been infinitely obliged to him for giving me an opportunity to discharge the only obligation that endangered me, without subjecting me to the consequence; and that I hoped he was satisfied I had paid the debt by offering myself to be chained, but was infinitely debtor to him another way for letting me remain free.
He was so confounded at this discourse that he knew not what to say, and, for a good while, he stood mute indeed; but recovering himself a little, he said I run out into a discourse he hoped was over and forgotten, and he did not intend to revive it; that he knew I had not had his letters, for that, when he first came to England, he had been at the place to which they were directed, and found them all lying there but one, and that the people had not known how to deliver them; that he thought to have had a direction there how to find me, but had the mortification to be told that they did not so much as know who I was; that he was under a great disappointment; and that I ought to know, in answer to all my resentments, that he had done a long and, he hoped, a sufficient penance for the slight that I had supposed he had put upon me; that it was true (and I could not suppose any other) that upon the repulse I had given them in a case so circumstanced as his was, and after such earnest entreaties and such offers as he had made me, he went away with a mind heartily grieved and full of resentment; that he had looked back on the crime he had committed with some regret, but on the cruelty of my treatment of the poor infant I went with at that time with the utmost detestation, and that this made him unable to send an agreeable answer to me; for which reason he had sent none at all for some time; but that in about six or seven months, those resentments wearing off by the return of his affection to me and his concern in the poor child There he stopped, and indeed tears stood in his eyes; while in a parenthesis he only added, and to this minute he did not know whether it was dead or alive. He then went on: Those resentments wearing off, he sent me several letters (I think he said seven or eight), but received no answer; that then, his business obliging him to go to Holland, he came to England, as in his way, but found, as above, that his letters had not been called for, but that he left them at the house after paying the postage of them; and, going then back to France, he was yet uneasy, and could not refrain the knight-errantry of coming to England again to seek me, though he knew neither where or of who to inquire for me, being disappointed in all his inquiries before; that he had yet taken up his residence here, firmly believing that one time or other he should meet me, or hear of me, and that some kind chance would at last throw him in my way; that he had lived thus above four years, and, though his hopes were vanished, yet he had not any thoughts of removing any more in the world, unless it should be at last, as it is with other old men, he might have some inclination to go home to die in his own country, but that he had not thought of it yet; that if
