Without knowing the house was so very vile a house from your intended information, I disliked the people too much, ever voluntarily to have returned to it.  But had you really written such cautions about Tomlinson, and the house, as you seem to have purposed to do, they must, had they come in time, have been of infinite service to me.  But not one word of either, whatever was your intention, did you mention to me, in that first of the three letters you so warmly tell me you did send me.  I will enclose it to convince you.*

* The letter she encloses was Mr. Lovelace’s forged one.  See Vol.  V. Letter XXX.

But your account of your messenger’s delivering to me your second letter, and the description he gives of me, as lying upon a couch, in a strange way, bloated, and flush-coloured; you don’t know how, absolutely puzzles and confounds me.

Lord have mercy upon the poor Clarissa Harlowe!  What can this mean!—­Who was the messenger you sent?  Was he one of Lovelace’s creatures too!—­ Could nobody come near me but that man’s confederates, either setting out so, or made so?  I know not what to make of any one syllable of this!  Indeed I don’t.

Let me see.  You say, this was before I went from Hampstead!  My intellects had not then been touched!—­nor had I ever been surprised by wine, [strange if I had!]:  How then could I be found in such a strange way, bloated and flush-coloured; you don’t know how!—­Yet what a vile, what a hateful figure has your messenger represented me to have made!

But indeed I know nothing of any messenger from you.

Believing myself secure at Hampstead, I staid longer there than I would have done, in hopes of the letter promised me in your short one of the 9th, brought me by my own messenger, in which you undertake to send for and engage Mrs. Townsend in my favour.*

* See Vol.  V. Letter XXIX.

I wondered I had not heard from you:  and was told you were sick; and, at another time, that your mother and you had had words on my account, and that you had refused to admit Mr. Hickman’s visits upon it:  so that I supposed, at one time, that you were not able to write; at another, that your mother’s prohibition had its due force with you.  But now I have no doubt that the wicked man must have intercepted your letter; and I wish he found not means to corrupt your messenger to tell you so strange a story.

It was on Sunday, June 11, you say, that the man gave it me.  I was at church twice that day with Mrs. Moore.  Mr. Lovelace was at her house the while, where he boarded, and wanted to have lodged; but I would not permit that, though I could not help the other.  In one of these spaces it must be that he had time to work upon the man.  You’ll easily, my dear, find that out, by inquiring the time of his arrival at Mrs. Moore’s and other circumstances of the strange way he pretended to see me in, on a couch, and the rest.