’After remaining some time at a farm-house in the country, and behaving to me all the time with honour, he brought me to handsome lodgings in town till still better provision could be made for me.  But they proved to be (as he indeed knew and designed) at a vile, a very vile creature’s; though it was long before I found her to be so; for I knew nothing of the town, or its ways.

’There is no repeating what followed:  such unprecedented vile arts!—­For I gave him no opportunity to take me at any disreputable advantage.’—­

And here (half covering her sweet face, with her handkerchief put to her tearful eyes) she stopt.

Hastily, as if she would fly from the hateful remembrance, she resumed:—­ ’I made escape afterward from the abominable house in his absence, and came to your’s:  and this gentleman has almost prevailed on me to think, that the ungrateful man did not connive at the vile arrest:  which was made, no doubt, in order to get me once more to those wicked lodgings:  for nothing do I owe them, except I were to pay them’—­[she sighed, and again wiped her charming eyes—­adding in a softer, lower voice]—­’for being ruined.’

Indeed, Madam, said I, guilty, abominably guilty, as he is in all the rest, he is innocent of this last wicked outrage.

’Well, and so I wish him to be.  That evil, heavy as it was, is one of the slightest evils I have suffered.  But hence you’ll observe, Mrs. Lovick, (for you seemed this morning curious to know if I were not a wife,) that I never was married.—­You, Mr. Belford, no doubt, knew before that I am no wife:  and now I never will be one.  Yet, I bless God, that I am not a guilty creature!

’As to my parentage, I am of no mean family; I have in my own right, by the intended favour of my grandfather, a fortune not contemptible:  independent of my father; if I had pleased; but I never will please.

’My father is very rich.  I went by another name when I came to you first:  but that was to avoid being discovered to the perfidious man:  who now engages, by this gentleman, not to molest me.

’My real name you now know to be Harlowe:  Clarissa Harlowe.  I am not yet twenty years of age.

’I have an excellent mother, as well as father; a woman of family, and fine sense—­worthy of a better child!—­they both doated upon me.

’I have two good uncles:  men of great fortune; jealous of the honour of their family; which I have wounded.

’I was the joy of their hearts; and, with theirs and my father’s, I had three houses to call my own; for they used to have me with them by turns, and almost kindly to quarrel for me; so that I was two months in the year with the one; two months with the other; six months at my father’s; and two at the houses of others of my dear friends, who thought themselves happy in me:  and whenever I was at any one’s, I was crowded upon with letters by all the rest, who longed for my return to them.