.—My eyes resisted the impulse of my heart, and turned haughtily from him; but he hung on my robe, he intreated he conjured, —he would be heard.—I feel I shall not have time to enter into the long explanation of his conduct which won from me an unwilling pardon: suffice it to say, that he knew every, the most secret, transaction in our house, nor ventured to marry till convinced I was

betrothed to Prince Henry. But, oh! the wretch he espoused!—Never may you know the crimes of which she has too probably been guilty! It was to Somerset's interposition we owed the prolongation of those lives, the pride and rage of the King had devoted from the moment he read the papers he took a malicious pleasure in destroying.—Still anxious for me, the Earl owned he had persuaded James to imprison us in this Castle, as well to secure our safety, as to provide us those comforts and conveniencies our royal relation would have deprived us of.
I could not be insensible to services like these; and finding my wrath began to abate, he awakened my pity, by describing the domestic miseries an unhappy marriage had imposed on him. The tears with which my wounded soul blotted this picture, induced him still farther to explain himself. His hopes of a divorce seemed rationally grounded, and I could not but enter into his views

on that head.—I was not however able to persuade him you would ever think as I did, and weakly promised a secresy I ought to have seen the danger of.—Yet, the prejudice which induced you to impute even our imprisonment to him, seemed so fixed, so unalterable, that though a thousand times the integrity of my nature tempted me to unfold to you the only secret my bosom ever teemed with, I shrunk before a mind so disgusted, nor dared to utter one syllable might pain you. The delays of Somerset, however necessary, alarmed and distressed me.—I became cold and melancholy; and too delicate to confide to him the true causes of this alteration, he soon assigned a false one. Peevishness and altercation now robbed our interviews of all their sweetness.—He often reproached me with having opened my heart to you, who alone could thus shut it against him.—Disdain urged me one day to assure him I would do so, the first moment I again beheld you.—He left me in a transport of rage. Alas, my heart

became sensible of one every way equal to it, when I found I was not permitted to return to your prison.—I refused to
