The lover and her sister never quitted the chamber for sixteen nights, nor took any other repose than throwing themselves alternately upon a little pallet in the same room. Having in her nature a great deal of gratitude, and a very tender sense of benefits; she promised upon her recovery to marry her guardian, which as soon as her health was sufficiently restored, she performed in the presence of a maid servant, her sister, and a gentleman who had married a relation. In a word, she was married, possessed, and ruin'd. The husband of our poetess brought her to London, fixed her in a remote quarter of it, forbad her to stir out of doors, or to receive the visits of her sister, or any other relations, friends, or acquaintance. This usage, she thought exceeding barbarous, and it grieved her the more excessively, since she married him only because she imagined he loved and doated on her to distraction; for as his person was but ordinary, and his age disproportioned, being twenty-years older than she, it could not be imagined that she was in love with him.--She was very uneasy at being kept a prisoner; but her husband's fondness and jealousy was made the pretence. She always loved reading, to which she was now more than ever obliged, as so much time lay upon her hands: Soon after she proved with child, and so perpetually ill, that she implored her husband to let her enjoy the company of her sister and friends. When he could have no relief from her importunity (being assured that in seeing her relations, she must discover his barbarous deceit) he thought it was best to be himself the relator of his villany; he fell upon his knees before her, with so much seeming confusion, distress and anguish, that she was at a loss to know what could mould his stubborn heart to such contrition. At last, with a thousand well counterfeited tears, and sighs, he stabb'd her with the wounding relation of his wife's being still alive; and with a hypocrite's pangs conjured her to have some mercy on a lost man as he was, in an obstinate, inveterate passion, that had no alternative but death, or possession. He urged, that could he have supported the pain of living without her, he never would have made himself so great a villain; but when the absolute question was, whether he should destroy himself, or betray her, self-love had turned the ballance, though not without that anguish to his soul, which had poisoned all his delights, and planted daggers to stab his peace. That he had a thousand times started in his sleep with guilty apprehensions; the form of her honoured father perpetually haunting his troubled dreams, reproaching him as a traitor to that trust which in his departing moments he had reposed in him; representing to his tortured imagination the care he took of his education, more like a father than an uncle, with which he had rewarded him by effecting the perdition of his favourite daughter, who was the lovely image of his benefactor.