ABSTRACT
While Ethelinde was watching over the declining health, and soothing the painful solicitude of Mrs. Montgomery, many weeks passed – not indeed happily, but in that state of satisfaction which the consciousness of doing her duty, of acquitting herself towards heaven and earth, has alone power to bestow. This resigned and chearful confidence was confirmed, when other letters were received from Montgomery. – These gave an account of his health having received less injury from the climate than is common to Europeans during their first abode in it: the letter to his mother was particularly chearful, and its perusal gave her at first more pleasure than her heart had, since his departure, been capable of feeling; but after she began to study it, as she did for many days, all her anxiety returned, though not to so painful an excess. She reflected that eight months had passed since that letter was written; and her tenderness made her so ingenious in tormenting herself, that she was perpetually considering all the circumstances which might since that period have occured to retard or prevent his return. It was still worse when she read his letter to Ethelinde. The ardour of his affection for her, had rendered him less capable of dissimulation; and forgetting the probability there was that his mother would see his letter, he related the disasters of his voyage, which had been tedious and unhealthy; and there appeared a languor and despondence in the style, a dread of being separated from her for ever, which he could not disguise. Of his actual situation he said, that it might be extremely lucrative to some other man: but that he had found it so impossible with his principles and his feelings to fill it, that he had solicited and obtained a removal to a distant settlement; where his knowledge of languages would be of great service to the company, and whither he should go in a few weeks from the date of his letter. He spoke in his letter to his mother of the same intention, but to her he described it as a matter of choice and of probable advantage. Now however it appeared, not only as removing him farther from her, and making it much longer before the letters of recall which she had sent out would reach him; but as a measure to which he was compelled by the unpleasantness of that situation which had been so differently described to him; and magnifying all her apprehensions, she soon relapsed into the depressing anxiety from which the first perusal of these letters had roused her.
