I hesitated an interruption; but my meaning died away upon my trembling lips.  I could only pronounce the word marriage—­and thus she proceeded: 

Let me, therefore, know whether I am to be controuled in the future disposal of myself?  Whether, in a country of liberty, as this, where the sovereign of it must not be guilty of your wickedness, and where you neither durst have attempted it, had I one friend or relation to look upon me, I am to be kept here a prisoner, to sustain fresh injuries?  Whether, in a word, you intend to hinder me from going where my destiny shall lead me?

After a pause—­for I was still silent: 

Can you not answer me this plain question?—­I quit all claim, all expectation, upon you—­what right have you to detain me here?

I could not speak.  What could I say to such a question?

O wretch! wringing her uplifted hands, had I not been robbed of my senses, and that in the basest manner—­you best know how—­had I been able to account for myself, and your proceedings, or to have known but how the days passed—­a whole week should not have gone over my head, as I find it has done, before I had told you, what I now tell you—­That the man who has been the villain to me you have been, shall never make me his wife.—­ I will write to my uncle, to lay aside his kind intentions in my favour—­ all my prospects are shut in—­I give myself up for a lost creature as to this world—­hinder me not from entering upon a life of severe penitence, for corresponding, after prohibition, with a wretch who has too well justified all their warnings and inveteracy; and for throwing myself into the power of your vile artifices.  Let me try to secure the only hope I have left.  This is all the amends I ask of you.  I repeat, therefore, Am I now at liberty to dispose of myself as I please?

Now comes the fool, the miscreant again, hesitating his broken answer:  My dearest love, I am confounded, quite confounded, at the thought of what—­ of what has been done; and at the thought of—­to whom.  I see, I see, there is no withstanding your eloquence!—­Such irresistible proofs of the love of virtue, for its own sake, did I never hear of, nor meet with, in all my reading.  And if you can forgive a repentant villain, who thus on his knees implores your forgiveness, [then down I dropt, absolutely in earnest in all I said,] I vow by all that’s sacred and just, (and may a thunderbolt strike me dead at your feet, if I am not sincere!) that I will by marriage before to-morrow noon, without waiting for your uncle, or any body, do you all the justice I now can do you.  And you shall ever after controul and direct me as you please, till you have made me more worthy of your angelic purity than now I am:  nor will I presume so much as to touch your garment, till I have the honour to call so great a blessing lawfully mine.

O thou guileful betrayer! there is a just God, whom thou invokest:  yet the thunderbolt descends not; and thou livest to imprecate and deceive!