 on his arrival in town, that they were regarded in a very injurious light by his friend Captain Bradshaw, who from residing under the same roof had apparently access to proper information, and had received his from the woman of the house.
Mr. Roatsley confidently asserted the falshood of these defamatory suspicions, and requested his friend to be more particular in his enquiries, and to talk again with the landlady, who when interrogated still continued to insinuate that you were not altogether what you appeared. Mr. Roatsley however was not so weak as to allow his judgment to be biassed by this report, nor was he lead for a moment to do you injustice, although he found that rumours to your disadvantage were pressed on him from more quarters than one; all originating no doubt from the same source; till one evening at the play, when he confessed—

Oh! repeat it not to me, dear Sir, cried I; I know too well that it was quite natural for him to think me light, thoughtless, and imprudent, when he beheld me at Drury lane attended by the wretch, whom I then found out to be Captain Farnford, and to all appearance voluntarily receiving his attentions: an accident which my indisposition alone occasioned; for you may believe no inducement on earth, had I been in a situation to have repulsed him, should have forced me to have granted him the shadow of my notice.
Well, Miss Seymour, thoughtless and imprudent I really believe he might conclude you to be, nor could he possibly think otherwise, ignorant as he was of the circumstances that produced Farnford's attendance, and conscious of the just cause he had given you for repugnance and disdain. He saw you together in the fame party, and it seems supported by him

when you left the box. He could not but imagine you had permitted all this, and of course must have supposed your resentment neither so lasting nor so severe as in strict delicacy he thought it ought to have been. Yet Mr. Roatsley solemnly swore, that to the disadvantage of your reputation a doubt or suspicion never once found place in his breast; and tho' wholly ignorant myself of the circumstances of the fact, I easily convinced him that in a point of delicacy Miss Seymour could not possibly be found in the slightest degree deficient.
That interest, however, which youth and beauty seldom fail to excite in the heart of a young man, (a sentiment, added he with a half smile, which Mr. Roatsley seems formed to feel with enthusiastic force) made him undergo no little disappointment I conjecture in perceiving you
