 account of what she pretended to have been witness to. I suffered her to talk on, for my very soul was sinking with anguish. My mother's honour destroyed! my Celestina torn from me! My soul recoiled from the idea as from an execrable falshood. Yet when I remembered the solemn injunction that beloved mother gave me in her last moments to marry Miss Fitz-Hayman, the promise she drew from me never

otherwise to unite myself—when my agonized mind ran back to the displeasure she sometimes expressed at my fondness and admiration for you—I dared not, with all the pain and all the horror I felt, I dared not throw from me with indignation this odious intelligence; I dared not load the hateful communicators of it with the odium which would have been dictated by my swelling heart, had it not been checked by these sad recollections, which pressed upon me in despite of myself, and gave me something like internal evidence of the facts I would very fain have denied.
There was, in the countenance of Lady Castlenorth, something of insolent triumph which I could not bear. She made a merit of her disinterested conduct, and talked of virtue, and honour, and integrity, till I was blind and deaf: she then threw out some reflections on my mother's memory, which roused me from the torpor of amazement

and sorrow to resentment; she uttered some malignant sarcasms against you, and I flew from her.
She had, however, completely executed her purpose, if it was that of rendering me the most wretched of human beings; and in quitting the house, which she did soon afterwards, had the barbarous pleasure of knowing that she had destroyed my peace for some time—if not for ever.
To return to you, Celestina, under the doubts which distracted me was impossible. To become your husband—so lately the fondest, the first wish of a heart that doated upon you, was not to be thought of, while ideas of so much horror obtruded themselves on my mind: yet to leave you without accounting for my absence, to leave you to all the torturing suspense of vague conjectures, to leave you to suppose I had deceived and forsaken you, was cruel, was unpardonable: it was, however, what,

after a long and dreadful struggle, I determined to do. I might, indeed, have put an end to your conjectures by delivering you over to others more tormenting—by communicating the doubts Lady Castlenorth had raised; but this I found I could less bear to do than even to leave you wholly in suspense. Believing her capable of any thing which revenge or malice
