 had not only broken for ever with Miss Fitz-Hayman, but was come to offer himself to her, who had from his childhood been the sole possessor of his affections.
This sudden and unexpected happiness was too much. Her reason, which in the severest calamity had never quite deserted her, now seemed unequal to tidings so overwhelming, and for a moment or two she sat like a statue; till Willoughby, in that well known voice, and with that graceful and manly tenderness which had rendered him ever so dear to her, related all that had passed from the hour of their

last parting, and the resolution he had adopted of sacrificing that wealth, which could not bestow happiness, to the long and incurable passion he had conceived for an object so deserving, and without whom no advantages of fortune or situation could give his life the smallest value.
Tears of gratitude and affection now fell from the eyes of Celestina; and as he found the tumult of her spirits subside, he went on to relate to her, with the most generous delicacy, the plans he had formed for their future life, and the means by which he hoped to retrieve his affairs, without sacrificing his happiness. Tenderly however as he touched on these subjects, his violated promise to his mother returned with all it's force to the recollection of Celestina. Willoughby, whose eyes were fixed on her's, saw the painful idea by their expression as soon as it arose, and in a voice that trembled from emotions he could not repress, he endeavoured to obviate the objections he feared she was

about to make, even before she could utter them.
All his eloquence, however, could not silence that monitor in the breast of Celestina, which told her that there was more of sophistry than of sound reason in his arguments; but fondly attached to him as she was, it was sophistry too enchanting for her to have courage to attempt detecting it. She wished to be convinced Willoughby was right; to see him happy had almost from her earliest recollection been the second wish of her heart; for perhaps to have the power of making him so had always, even unknown to herself, been the first: that happiness seemed now to depend upon her; and she determined (after one of those short struggles, in which, when inclination and duty contend, the former has too often the advantage,) to stisle within her own bosom every painful remembrance, to think as he thought, and in rendering happy the son of her benesactress, to acquit herself

through her future life of the debt of gratitude she
