 engaged him; and this roused in her a reflection greatly to his credit; for if the bare mention of a correspondence with a woman of honour could induce such a youth to give up a guilty connection unsolicited, what might not have been expected from him had his

other pursuits been sanctioned by the advice of sensible and respectable friends. And yet prudence had whispered to Emma that it was certainly, but yet barely, possible for Charles to have given up Miss Newton in compliment to his housekeeper's daughter. This business, therefore, she made a point of coming at; to do which, she visited the old lady one day when our hero, as she knew, was engaged at his mill, about five miles out of town.
There was something in this old lady that had before strongly prepossessed Emma in her favour, and as the latter came not out of any improper curiosity, to make an advantage of any thing she should hear to the other's disadvantage, and as the former had never made a secret of the story, but, on the contrary, though against our hero's will, taken every opportunity of singing forth his praises, by repeating the circumstances of it as far as he had been concerned in it, to every one who asked it, it will not either surprise the reader to hear that Emma got out of the old gentlewoman the particulars of her whole life, or that when she had done so, she admired the extraordinary goodness of Charles more than ever:—and here the reader will reflect with double pleasure that this was the very domestic, or rather companion, he retained in his circumstances of adverse fortune.

The old lady having first, like Othello, told her story in parcels, Emma begged to have it from her youth up: the which to hear did she most seriously incline. What she told at length, I shall give the reader briefly; for I have no time for spinning out narratives.
She was the daughter of a gentleman, who had a life place in a public office, and had been thrown very early in life, with a small fortune, into the protection of an aunt, who unfortunately being a woman of intrigue, connived at her ruin. Her seducer, by whom she had a child, was a clergyman; but as he soon left her, she was compassionated by another relation, who took her home, obliged the father to take the child, which was a boy, and got her fortune out of the hands of her aunt.
It was not many months before a respectable tradesman paid his addresses
