Cl. [Interrupting; and to me,] If I am not invaded by you, Sir; if I am, (as I ought to be,) my own mistress, I think to stay here, in this honest house, [and then had I an eye-beam, as the Captain calls it, flashed at me,] till I receive a letter from Miss Howe.  That, I hope, will be in a day or two.  If in that time the ladies come whom you expect, and if they are desirous to see the creature whom you have made unhappy, I shall know whether I can or cannot receive their visit.

She turned short to the door, and, retiring, went up stairs to her chamber.

O Sir, said the Captain, as soon as she was gone, what an angel of a woman is this!  I have been, and I am a very wicked man.  But if any thing should happen amiss to this admirable lady, through my means, I shall have more cause for self-reproach than for all the bad actions of my life put together.

And his eyes glistened.

Nothing can happen amiss, thou sorrowful dog!—­What can happen amiss?  Are we to form our opinion of things by the romantic notions of a girl, who supposes that to be the greatest which is the slightest of evils?  Have I not told thee our whole story?  Has she not broken her promise?  Did I not generously spare her, when in my power?  I was decent, though I had her at such advantage.—­Greater liberties have I taken with girls of character at a common romping ’bout, and all has been laughed off, and handkerchief and head-clothes adjusted, and petticoats shaken to rights, in my presence.  Never man, in the like circumstances, and resolved as I was resolved, goaded on as I was goaded on, as well by her own sex, as by the impulses of a violent passion, was ever so decent.  Yet what mercy does she show me?

Now, Jack, this pitiful dog was such another unfortunate one as thyself —­his arguments serving to confirm me in the very purpose he brought them to prevail upon me to give up.  Had he left me to myself, to the tenderness of my own nature, moved as I was when the lady withdrew, and had he set down, and made odious faces, and said nothing—­it is very possible that I should have taken the chair over against him, which she had quitted, and have cried and blubbered with him for half an hour together.  But the varlet to argue with me!—­to pretend to convince a man, who knows in is heart that he is doing a wrong thing!—­He must needs think that this would put me upon trying what I could say for myself; and when the extended compunction can be carried from the heart to the lips it must evaporate in words.

Thou, perhaps, in this place, wouldst have urged the same pleas that he urged.  What I answered to him therefore may do for thee, and spare thee the trouble of writing, and me of reading, a good deal of nonsense.

Capt.  You were pleased to tell me, Sir, that you only proposed to try her virtue; and that you believed you should actually marry her.