 was framed with a view either of duping me into a marriage, which she believed you would

prefer, or of paying Mr. W— the compliment of sacrificing me to him, if I should return a favourable answer."


"There is no describing the height of resentment to which I was affected upon this occasion, and I should have replied to the proposal in the most outrageous terms imaginable, if my love and fondness for you, which still remained, though my esteem was flown, had not restrained my hand, and dictated those cool, but not violent lines, I sent her in answer."

He told me, that when he returned to England, upon his father's illness, he felt himself impelled by a strong desire of seeking some proper opportunity of reproaching me for my infidelity, and of

covering me with the utmost confusion, by expressing the detestation and contempt, that even a man, and a soldier, was capable of conceiving at the breach of honour or virtue in a woman that he loved.
He mentioned this purpose, he said, in a letter to Matilda, and she most strenuously opposed it; she told him that such a sentiment was no good sign of a recovery from his infatuated passion, for she feared much that
"All the malice of his heart was love."
That this would be but affording me the triumph of thinking him still my slave, and might put it in my power to involve him, perhaps, in a duel with Mr. W—, whom she represented as extremely jealous, from very conscious reasons, if, as

it was more than probable, I should be willing to exchange my wedding-garment for a widow's weed.

However all these arguments not being sufficient to deter him from coming to Bath, he wrote her word that he would be there on such a day, and has had reason to suppose, since, that she must have advised Mr. W— of this particular, by his coming so critically from London, on the same day, and meeting him in the Rooms that fatal night which I have before mentioned to you.
I need not now, my dear brother, recapitulate what passed, in consequence of this vile woman's malice; you have hitherto seen me the innocent victim of her cruelty—Too happy should I now deem myself, had I still remained so.

My fainting in the Rooms, at the sight of Captain L—, awakened his former tenderness for me; and the inhumanity with which Mr. W— treated me, on that occasion, for the surgeon had made the story public,
