ABSTRACT
I was hastening towards the apartment where I slept, and uttering a variety of frantic ejaculations, when I met Mr. Rightly, who, judging by my looks that I meditated mischief, stopped, and disarmed me. The task was not difficult; for sorrow, blended with compunction, so completely enervated my whole frame, that an infant might have overpowered me. I knew not what to do: – the distress which Colonel Aubrey evidently laboured under, and of which my precipitate conduct had been the original cause, was, with all its poignancy, trifling in comparison with what I at that moment suffered. Not only the miseries of my best and most generous friend, but the destruction of an innocent and amiable girl, pressed heavily on my conscience. What was to be done under this accumulation of distress? – I had no remedy but in an act of desperation, no hope of tranquillity but in the grave.
