Page:The Wanderer (1814 Volume 2).pdf/221

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justice; and how wide it would be from my approbation."

She sat down, sensibly affected by the necessity of uttering this vindication.

"Well, then," said he, without observing her distress, "won't it be more honest to run in debt with an old bachelor, who has nobody but himself to take care of, than with a set of poor people who, perhaps, have got their houses full of children?"

The word honest, and the impossibility of disproving a charge of injuring those by whom she had been served, so powerfully shocked her feelings in arraigning her principles, that she could frame no answer.

Conceiving her silence to be assent, he returned to the chimney-piece, and, taking the little packet of bills, prepared to put it into his pocket-book; but, hastily, then, rising, she entreated him to restore it without delay.

Her manner was so earnest that he did not dare contest her will, though he