 to his marriage, should put it out of his power to break the engagement he had made to Mrs. Willoughby in her last hours, and to sacrifice every thing to his passion. The

struggle he underwent however was dreadful, and by continually repeating to himself the necessity there was for his forgetting Celestina, he so accustomed himself to think of her, that he in reality soon ceased to think with interest of any body else; and though he endeavoured to persuade himself that he should have courage to acquit himself of what he tried to think his duty to his family, to his mother's memory, and himself, there was no intelligence he so much dreaded as that of the arrival of his uncle's family in England.
Celestina on her part, passed her time in a way very unpleasant to her. Mrs. Molyneux, now mistress of herself, plunged into unceasing dissipation; and as Celestina was frequently desired to accompany her, and always to make one of the parties she collected at her own house, she found that the expences of dress alone would greatly exceed the income of her little fortune, and that she should soon exhaust it to live among people whose society gave her no

pleasure, and who for the most part considered her only as she was capable of filling up a table or the corner of a coach when it was vacant. Her quickness of apprehension and extreme sensibility made her too frequently remark, that the table or the coach might in the apprehension of Matilda always be as well, and sometimes better filled; and these observations, together with her growing dislike to Mr. Molyneux, and the people with whom he associated, who not unfrequently treated her with the impertinent familiarity which they thought themselves at liberty to use towards Mrs. Molyneux's companion, renewed, before she had been six weeks in town, her wish to quit them for ever, and to enjoy in her own way the small independence given her by her lamented benefactress.
The certainty that Miss Fitz-Hayman was so soon to become the wife of the only man for whom she ever had felt the least degree of partiality, hastened the execution of her project. She now heard every day

of the great beauty, the extraordinary accomplishments, and the immense fortune of the future bride, while Mrs. Molyneux was exercising her fancy on the equipages, and other preparations which were so soon to be on foot for the wedding of her brother; a subject that Celestina always listened to with impatience, which, though she with difficulty concealed it from others, she was painfully conscious of herself. The eternal
