The first promise you ever made me! Life and death perhaps depending upon it—my heart desponding from the barbarous methods resolved to be taken with you in malice to me!
You would sooner choose death than Solmes. (How my soul spurns the competition!) O my beloved creature, what are these but words?—Whose words?—Sweet and ever adorable—What?—Promise breaker—must I call you?—How shall I believe the asseveration, (your supposed duty in the question! Persecution so flaming!—Hatred to me so strongly avowed!) after this instance of you so lightly dispensing with your promise?
If, my dearest life! you would prevent my distraction, or, at least, distracted consequences, renew the promised hope!—My fate is indeed upon its crisis.
Forgive me, dearest creature, forgive me!—I know I have written in too much anguish of mind!—Writing this, in the same moment that the just dawning light has imparted to me the heavy disappointment.
I dare not re-peruse what I have written. I must deposit it. It may serve to shew you my distracted apprehension that this disappointment is but a prelude to the greatest of all.—Nor, having here any other paper, am I able to write again, if I would, on this gloomy spot. (Gloomy is my soul; and all Nature around me partakes of my gloom!)—I trust it therefore to your goodness—if its fervour excite your displeasure rather than your pity, you wrong my passion; and I shall be ready to apprehend, that I am intended to be the sacrifice of more miscreants than one! [Have patience with me, dearest creature!—I mean Solmes and your brother only.] But if, exerting your usual generosity, you will excuse and re appoint, may that God, whom you profess to serve, and who is the God of truth and of promises, protect and bless you, for both; and for restoring to himself, and to hope,
Your ever-adoring, yet almost desponding, LOVELACE!
Ivy Cavern, in the Coppice—Day but just breaking.
This is the answer I shall return:
WEDNESDAY MORNING.