Now, in very good earnest, do you think ’tis time for me to come or no?  Would you be very glad to see me there, and could you do it in less disorder, and with less surprise, than you did at Chicksands?

I ask you these questions very seriously; but yet how willingly would I venture all to be with you.  I know you love me still; you promised me, and that’s all the security I can have in this world.  ’Tis that which makes all things else seem nothing to it, so high it sets me; and so high, indeed, that should I ever fall ’twould dash me all to pieces.  Methinks your very charity should make you love me more now than ever, by seeing me so much more unhappy than I used, by being so much farther from you, for that is all the measure can be taken of my good or ill condition.  Justice, I am sure, will oblige you to it, since you have no other means left in the world of rewarding such a passion as mine, which, sure, is of a much richer value than anything in the world besides.  Should you save my life again, should you make me absolute master of your fortune and your person too, I should accept none of all this in any part of payment, but look upon you as one behindhand with me still.  ’Tis no vanity this, but a true sense of how pure and how refined a nature my passion is, which none can ever know except my own heart, unless you find it out by being there.

How hard it is to think of ending when I am writing to you; but it must be so, and I must ever be subject to other people’s occasions, and so never, I think, master of my own.  This is too true, both in respect of this fellow’s post that is bawling at me for my letter, and of my father’s delays.  They kill me; but patience,—­would anybody but I were here!  Yet you may command me ever at one minute’s warning.  Had I not heard from you by this last, in earnest I had resolved to have gone with this, and given my father the slip for all his caution.  He tells me still of a little time; but, alas! who knows not what mischances and how great changes have often happened in a little time?

For God’s sake let me hear of all your motions, when and where I may hope to see you.  Let us but hope this cloud, this absence that has overcast all my contentment, may pass away, and I am confident there’s a clear sky attends us.  My dearest dear, adieu.

Yours.

Pray, where is your lodging?  Have a care of all the despatch and security that can be in our intelligence.  Remember my fellow-servant; sure, by the next I shall write some learned epistle to her, I have been so long about it.

Letter 58.—­Dorothy is now in London, staying probably with that aunt whom she mentioned before as one who was always ready to find her a husband other than Temple.  Of the plot against the Protector in which my Lord of Dorchester is said to be engaged, an account is given in connection with Letter 59; that is, presuming it to be the same plot, and that Lord Dorchester is one of the many persons arrested under suspicion of being concerned in it.  I cannot find anything which identifies him with a special plot.