And I could not help watching her emotions; and seeing her
once putting a letter she had just folded up, into her bosom, at my
entrance into my mother's dressing-room, I made no doubt of detecting
her, and her correspondent; and so I took the letter from her stays,
she trembling and curtseying with a sweet confusion: and highly
pleased I was to find it contained only innocence and duty to the
deceased mistress, and the loving parents, expressing her joy that,
in the midst of her grief for losing the one, she was not obliged
to return to be a burden to the other; and I gave it her again, with
words of encouragement, and went down much better satisfied than I had
been with her correspondence.
"But when I reflected upon the innocent simplicity of her style, I was
still more in love with her, and formed a stratagem, and succeeded in
it, to come at her other letters, which I sent forward, after I had
read them, all but three or four, which I kept back, when my plot
began to ripen for execution; although the little slut was most
abominably free with my character to her parents.
"You will censure me, no doubt, that my mother's injunctions made not
a more lasting impression. But really I struggled hard with myself
to give them their due force: and the dear girl, as I said, every day
grew lovelier, and more accomplished.
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