Confounded and bewildered by my asseveration, my father knew not
whose veracity to impeach; but, charitably concluding there was some
mistake, or that I was, as heretofore, a fickle, thoughtless being,
considered himself bound in honour to communicate the substance of our
conversation to Mr Somerville; and the latter no sooner received it,
than he placed the letter in Emily's hands--a very comfortable kind
of _avant-courier_ for a lover, after an absence from his mistress of
full three years.
I arrived at the hall, bursting with impatience to see the lovely
girl, whose hold on my heart and affection was infinitely stronger
than I had ever supposed. Darting from the chaise, I flew into the
sitting-room, where she usually passed her morning. I was now in my
twenty-second year; my figure was decidedly of a handsome cast; my
face, what I knew most women admired. My personal advantages were
heightened by the utmost attention to dress; the society of the fair
Acadians had very much polished my manners, and I had no more of the
professional roughness of the sea than what, like the crust on the
port-wine, gave an agreeable flavour; my countenance was as open and
as ingenuous as my heart was deceitful and desperately wicked.
Emily rose with much agitation, and in an instant was clasped in my
arms: not that the movement was voluntary on her part; it was wholly
on mine. She rather recoiled; but for an instant seemed to have
forgotten the fatal communication which her father had made to her not
two hours before.
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