Page:Adventures of Rachel Cunningham.djvu/18

 sister from his residence, Miss Lennam Penville.an amiable young lady, of most respectable and opulent family, residing in Annapolis, who had, for a long time previous to his unfortunate connection with Rachel Cunningham, received and favoured the addresses of Mr. G, and to whom he had some months before made promise of marriage, which marriage, according to arrangements entered into prior to his leaving home, was to have been consummated in (at the time of his return,) about five weeks to come, went to his house, and, as her purpose then was, ventured on the ground of her honourable intimacy and expectations to expostulate with him upon the very great impropriety and cruelty of his treatment to his sisters, at the same time urging, in the mildest terms with the hope of reclaiming him, the sacred promise he had given her,—the insulting outrage on her feelings ho was now hourly committing by devoting himself to the filthy embraces of an abandoned woman, and that if he still persisted in it, short as the period was to the promised time For their union, she fell in herself the sad certainty, instead of his receiving her hand at the altar, ere it arrived she should be for ever wedded to her grave.

Although those tender sentiments, accompanied with tears wrung from the breaking heart's bitterest anguish gushing down her lovely cheeks, were uttered in a tone of grief that might have melted the most obdurate bosom to soft soothing pity, he suffered her to depart, with scarcely a kind word on which her woes could rest a hope upon.

Rachel, who purposely concealed had overheard the same exulting in her triumph, then came forth from her hiding-place, and with a thousand artful wiles she hung upon his neck.—kissed him with seemingly vehement affection,—applauded to extacy his self-possession,—flattered him on his manly resistance; but above all extolled his inflexible attachment in love, she said, more than the worth of worlds to her; and, in fine, by her witching caresses, superinduced him to write a note peremptorily interdicting Miss Penvilie's future visits on any occasion whatsoever to him. That letter had its effect: Miss Penville instantly sickened; it was decidedly the instrument of her death; but a few days after her receiving this, expired literally of a broken heart, and, as in her