 luxury, for such a precarious subsistence as women can earn in business. My remonstrances she heard with gentleness, and mingled her tears with mine: but she pleaded gratitude to the friend who supported her, and the impossibility of her abandoning him, or existing if she did. I was afraid of enquiring who this was; but I found that it was some man of high rank who had taken her from the worthless Beresford, and with whom she had lived ever since.
"Her purpose seemed to be to detach my thoughts as much as possible from her situation, and to fix them on my own: and indeed it was very necessary; for we had now, in consequence of Elphinstone's long illness, no support whatever but what her tenderness afforded us.
"As Elphinstone recovered his health, his sanguine temper returned, and again

he formed various projects of entering into business. It was now the midst of the American troubles; and some part of my father's property, which was thought recoverable, was there. Elphinstone, who now from long habit and from his natural disposition, was become unsettled and fond of speculative schemes, proposed to the creditors to go over there in search of these sums. I was still too ill and too much depressed by past sufferings to give very minute attention to this plan: I only resolved not to be left behind, but to share his destiny whatever it might be. In a fortnight or three weeks he was every day in town, and the latter part of that time returned in remarkably gay spirits, and told me of I know not what prospects that were opening to him; to which, indifferent to every thing beyond a mere subsistence, now that I had lost my boy, and long accustomed to hear of visionary fortune, I gave very little applause, till he came home one day elated beyond what I had ever seen before, and

told me that an offer had that day been made him to become a sort of under secretary to a man high in administration, into whose house he was to be taken; that he was to enter on his place the following week, had taken a lodging for me in the neighbourhood, and hired two female servants and a footman to attend.
"I wondered at, and rather blamed his precipitancy; but he assured me he was right. Frank went with us, as he was to be a sort of secretary, in his turn, to Elphinstone, who was now domesticated with his patron, while my brother and I were in very handsome lodgings in Westminster. I do not know
