of our old love story, had appeared, and,
unnoticed by anybody, had spread his web,
and arranged his pitfalls with Satanic subtlety.
A Captain Mathews, a married man, had introduced
himself to old Linley as a man who could
be of service to him. Patrons of this kind were
useful in selling concert tickets, and organising
musical performances. The old composer was
too confiding or too rapt in his studies to see
through the scoundrel. Self-interest made him
reluctant to discover evil in so zealous a friend.
Miss Linley was a guileless, romantic, credulous
girl of fourteen, fresh from country retirement,
and surrounded by admiring fops, whose flattery
was as extravagant and bizarre as it was
transparently false. She believed no one's vows, but
she pitied their pretended sufferings. For three
years Mathews had never ceased his assiduities,
his respectful and untiring gallantry, his
protestation, and his sighs of counterfeit distress.
The innocent girl liked him, and promised him
her friendship. To turn this friendship into
love, he redoubled his artifices. People now
began to take alarm; friends spoke to old
Linley; but he was unwilling to lose so useful
a friend, and treated the rumours as mere
nonsense. Miss Linley's heart was almost lost,
and she began to reproach herself for her growing
love. She says:

"When he went into the country for the
summer, I resolved, whatever it cost me, to tear
him from my heart, and when he returned, to
avoid him everywhere. With these resolutions
I consoled myself till winter. When he returned,
he had not been in town a week before we had
repeated invitations to his house. Conscious
that I could never forget him if I was always
to be exposed to his solicitations, I informed
my mother of everything he had said to me, and
at the same time told her how far he had gained
my heart. Oh, my dear friend, had my mother but
then acted properly, I had now been happy;
but she, too much attached to interest, laughed
at my uneasiness, and told me that novels had
turned my head; and that I fancied if any one
was civil to me he must certainly be in love.
She desired I would put such thoughts out of
my head, for no man could think seriously of
such a child. Thus was I again led into
temptation, and exposed to all the artifices of a
man whom I already loved but too well, and
who was but too sensible of it. I could not fly
from the danger. After my first reproof I was
ashamed to mention it again to my mother, and
I had everything to fear from my father's violent
temper. For another year we went on in the
same manner, till at last, finding it impossible to
conquer my inclinations, he soon brought me to a
confession of my weakness, which has been the
cause of all my distress."

She now forbade Mathews speaking to her,
on which he pretended to be dying, and prayed
earnestly for one final interview before he left
England for ever. The interview took place.
Mrs. Linley, informed of this, taxed her daughter
with it, greatly enraged; but on hearing that
the conduct of Mathews had been marked by
the strictest honour and respect, she consented to
conceal the secret from her husband. This was a
second fault in the mother.

The poor girl no longer tried to subdue her
love, and still reproached herself with being the
cause of such an honest man's wretchedness.
Mrs. Linley then made her daughter write a
letter to Mathews arranging an interview, and
at the appointed hour went herself,
confronted, and reproached him. Mathews, calm,
polished, and plausible, however, so won the
foolish and selfish mother, that he made her
promise, if he swore never to see her daughter
alone, that the intimacy between the two families
should remain unbroken.

Soon after this, Miss Linley, while on a visit
in the country, being told that Mr. Long was
going to defend the action brought against him,
and plead her interviews with Mr. Mathews,
fell into a fever, became delirious, and
manifested such symptoms of decline that she had
to be sent to the Wells to drink the waters.
Whilst there, she heard, to her indignation and
anguish, that Mathews, during her illness, had
been speaking lightly of her in public, and
boasting that it was only love for him that had
made her leave Bath. This heartless behaviour.
shocked and disgusted her, and in her anger she
forgot her despondency.

"When I had so far recovered my spirits
and health," she says, "as to be able to walk
and ride, I became acquainted with Mr. R.,
who, from the first time he saw me, was
particular in his behaviour to me. I did not at
first observe it; and, as I thought him an agreeable
man, and one who, I was told, bore an
unexceptionable character, I did not avoid him
as much as I certainly ought. I wished, likewise,
by turning my attention to him, to eradicate
every impression of Mathews; but though
Mr. R. behaved with the greatest delicacy, I
found it impossible to love him. I went on in
this manner for some time, and, by Mr. R.'s
attention to me, incurred the ill will of all the
ladies, who did not spare to censure my
conduct; but as I was conscious in my own heart
of no ill, and wished to convince Mathews that
he had not so much reason to boast of his
conquest, I paid very little attention to the envy of
the women."

Alas! Mr. R., too, was only a cowardly sort
of lover. He one day confessed his love, but
asked her to marry him privately, as he was
entirely dependent on his father, except a small
pension he had. At his father's death he would
marry her again in the face of the world. Miss
Linley, angry at this ignominious proposal, never
more allowed Mr. R. to address her as a lover.

"I was thus situated," says the entangled
girl, "when Mathews came to the Wells,
on his road to Wales. He had been
extremely ill at Bath, and when I saw him in the
public walk at the Wells, I could scarce keep
myself from fainting; there was such an alteration
in his person, I could scarcely have believed
it possible. He spoke to me once in the walk,
and asked me if I resolved to be his death;