Two days later, in a sudden access of fear of the dangerous adventure the nature of which her lover was concealing from her, Isabella wrote again:
“——Dear Hynson, I am afraid you are going to engage in such a thing that will be a means for us to never met again. Oh Hynson, as you will not be open and candid enough to tell me what plan you are upon, I must submit—I long to see you.”
Others, writing to Hynson from the house in Stepney Causeway, confirm Isabella’s account of her melancholy. “As to poor Bell, you have not been out of her head since you have been gone,” Mrs. Jump wrote him, while Robert added a postscript merely to say:
“Bell’s kind love (she bother’d me so I could not help it).”
In a letter of his own Robert wrote:
“As to my Sister Bell’s Behaviour, for Mamma has adopted her [as a] daughter.... She has been nowhere but to Mrs. Hazelden’s and our house since you went, and you have all this time engrossed all her Thoughts and Discourses.”
And a casual visitor to the household contributed, banteringly:
“I am now sitting beside Mrs. Jump and your fair Isabella, who sends off a Letter to you, and we shall all plague you till we have you again by the Fireside with us, for we can’t spare You. You are a happy Fellow to be so necessary to the Happiness of the Fair. I long to crack a bottle with you once more, and could wish that the summer was come, that we might have a little Junketting about the Country together.”
Hynson himself, writing from Dover to Mrs. Jump, said teasingly, for Isabella’s overhearing:
“You desire me to come back to be tormented by that little Girl, but that is out of the question.”