More I cannot, at this time, nor need I say:  and this I desire you to keep to yourself, lest resentments should be taken up when I am gone, that may spread the evil which I hope will end with me.

I have been misinformed, you say, as to my principal relations being at my uncle Harlowe’s.  The day, you say, was not kept.  Nor have my brother and Mr. Solmes—­Astonishing!—­What complicated wickedness has this wretched man to answer for!—­Were I to tell you, you would hardly believe that there could have been such a heart in man.—­

But one day you may know the whole story!—­At present I have neither inclination nor words—­O my bursting heart!—­Yet a happy, a wished relief!—­Were you present my tears would supply the rest!

***

I resume my pen!

And so you fear no letter will be received from me.  But don’t grieve to tell me so!  I expect every thing bad—­and such is my distress, that had you not bid me hope for mercy from the throne of mercy, I should have been afraid that my father’s dreadful curse would be completed with regard to both worlds.

For here, an additional misfortune!—­In a fit of phrensical heedlessness, I sent a letter to my beloved Miss Howe, without recollecting her private address; and it has fallen into her angry mother’s hands:  and so that dear friend perhaps has anew incurred displeasure on my account.  And here too your worthy son is ill; and my poor Hannah, you think, cannot come to me—­O my dear Mrs. Norton, will you, can you censure those whose resentments against me Heaven seems to approve of? and will you acquit her whom that condemns?

Yet you bid me not despond.—­I will not, if I can help it.  And, indeed, most seasonable consolation has your kind letter afforded me.—­Yet to God Almighty do I appeal, to avenge my wrongs, and vindicate my inno——­

But hushed be my stormy passions!—­Have I not but this moment said that your letter gave me consolation?—­May those be forgiven who hinder my father from forgiving me!—­and this, as to them, shall be the harshest thing that shall drop from my pen.

But although your son should recover, I charge you, my dear Mrs. Norton, that you do not think of coming to me.  I don’t know still but your mediation with my mother (although at present your interposition would be so little attended to) may be of use to procure me the revocation of that most dreadful part of my father’s curse, which only remains to be fulfilled.  The voice of Nature must at last be heard in my favour, surely.  It will only plead at first to my friends in the still conscious plaintiveness of a young and unhardened beggar.  But it will grow more clamorous when I have the courage to be so, and shall demand, perhaps, the paternal protection from farther ruin; and that forgiveness, which those will be little entitled to expect, for their own faults, who shall interpose to have it refused to me, for an accidental, not a premeditated error:  and which, but for them, I had never fallen into.