Page:History of Moll Flanders (3).pdf/9

 three children, till at length he fell sick in a house he had taken for his wife and family at Bloomsbury. But upon his recovery, I found that I was slighted, no doubt through remorse of con- science. Yet he sent me a letter with a bank-note of fifty pounds, promising he would take care of my little boy, but wanting to get the other fifty pounds of him, I signed a general release which put an end to this affair.

But it was not long before it was my fortune to get an acquaintance with a clerk belonging to the bank, whose wife having made him a cuckold by keeping company with an officer of the army, and after that with an apprentice belonging to a draper. I had like to have become his bride, promising on that account to get a diverse from his other wife.

But whilst this was doing, going down into Lancashire, and being imagined to be a fortune of fifteen thousand pounds, I was married to an Irish gentleman, by a Romish clergyman; but he finding that I had no such effects as I like a false woman had represented unto him, nor he any estate more than