"Though I have every reason to wish the melancholy event which brought me here, might continue unknown; yet your generous concern for a stranger, who had no recommendation to your notice but her appearing unhappy, and whose suspicious situation would have injured her in a mind less noble than yours, has determined me to lay before you a story, which it was my resolution to conceal for ever. "I saw, Madam, in your countenance, when you honored me by calling at my house this morning, and I saw with an admiration no words can speak, the amiable struggle between the desire of knowing the nature of my distress in order to soften it, and the delicacy which forbad your enquiries, lest they should wound my sensibility and self-love. "To such a heart I run no hazard in relating what in the world would, perhaps, draw on me a thousand reproaches; reproaches, however, I flatter myself, undeserved. "You have had the politeness to say, there is something in my appearance which speaks my birth above my present situation: in this, Madam, I am so happy as not to deceive your generous partiality. "My father, who was an officer of family and merit, had the misfortune to lose my mother whilst I was an infant. "He had the goodness to take on himself the care of directing my education, and to have me taught whatever he thought becoming my sex, though at an expence much too great for his income. "As he had little more than his commission, his parental tenderness got so far the better of his love for his profession, that, when I was about fifteen, he determined on quitting the army, in order to provide better for me; but, whilst he was in treaty for this purpose, a fever carried him off in a few days, and left me to the world, with little more than five hundred pounds, which, however, was, by his will, immediately in my power. "I felt too strongly the loss of this excellent parent to attend to any other consideration; and, before I was enough myself to think what I was to do for a subsistence, a friend of my own age, whom I tenderly loved, who was just returning from school to her father's, in the north of England, insisted on my accompanying her, and spending some time with her in the country. "I found in my dear Sophia, all the consolation my grief could receive; and, at her pressing solicitation, and that of her father, who saw his daughter's happiness depended on having me with her, I continued there three years, blest in the calm delights of friendship, and those blameless pleasures, with which we should be too happy, if the heart could content itself, when a young baronet, whose form was as lovely as his soul was dark, came to interrupt our felicity.