Page:The Adventures of David Simple (1904).djvu/228

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The Adventures of David Simple

nately looking through a magnifying glass and the other end of the perspective. But here I must leave him to his own reflections, to look after the object of them, and see what became of Cynthia since her leaving David.

On her arrival in the country, where she proposed to herself the enjoying a pleasure in seeing her old acquaintance, and a little to recruit her sunk spirits, after all the uneasiness she had suffered; the first news she heard was, that her cousin had been buried a week, having lost her mother half a year before. However, she went to the house where she had lived. Here she was informed that the young woman had left all the little she was worth, amounting to the sum of thirty pounds a year, to a cousin of hers, who was gone abroad with a woman of fashion. Cynthia soon found by the circumstances that this cousin was herself. This, instead of lessening, increased her affliction for her death; for the consideration that neither time nor absence could drive from the poor young creature's memory the small kindnesses she had received from her formerly, made the good-natured Cynthia but the more sensible of her loss.

She could bear the house no longer than was just necessary to settle her affairs, and then took a place in the stage coach, with a resolution of returning to London; being like people in a burning fever, who, from finding themselves continually uneasy, are in hopes by every change of place to find relief.


CHAPTER IV

which treats of some remarkable discourse that passed between passengers in a stage coach

Three gentlemen were her fellow travellers: it was dark when they set out, and the various thoughts