I am now led, by the progress of the story, to the last branch of her history, the connection between Mary and myself.  And this I shall relate with the same simplicity that has pervaded every other part of my narrative.  If there ever were any motives of prudence or delicacy, that could impose a qualification upon the story, they are now over.  They could have no relation but to factitious rules of decorum.  There are no circumstances of her life, that, in the judgment of honour and reason, could brand her with disgrace.  Never did there exist a human being, that needed, with less fear, expose all their actions, and call upon the universe to judge them.  An event of the most deplorable sort, has awfully imposed silence upon the gabble of frivolity.

We renewed our acquaintance in January 1796, but with no particular effect, except so far as sympathy in her anguish, added in my mind to the respect I had always entertained for her talents.  It was in the close of that month that I read her Letters from Norway; and the impression that book produced upon me has been already related.

It was on the fourteenth of April that I first saw her after her excursion into Berkshire.  On that day she called upon me in Somers Town, she having, since her return, taken a lodging in Cumming-street, Pentonville, at no great distance from the place of my habitation.  From that time our intimacy increased, by regular, but almost imperceptible degrees.

The partiality we conceived for each other, was in that mode, which I have always regarded as the purest and most refined style of love.  It grew with equal advances in the mind of each.  It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before, and who was after.  One sex did not take the priority which long-established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed.  I am not conscious that either party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil-spreader or the prey, in the affair.  When, in the course of things, the disclosure came, there was nothing, in a manner, for either party to disclose to the other.

In July 1796 I made an excursion into the county of Norfolk, which occupied nearly the whole of that month.  During this period Mary removed, from Cumming-street, Pentonville, to Judd place West, which may be considered as the extremity of Somers Town.  In the former situation, she had occupied a furnished lodging.  She had meditated a tour to Italy or Switzerland, and knew not how soon she should set out with that view.  Now however she felt herself reconciled to a longer abode in England, probably without exactly knowing why this change had taken place in her mind.  She had a quantity of furniture locked up at a broker’s ever since her residence in Store-street, and she now found it adviseable to bring it into use.  This circumstance occasioned her present removal.