Page:Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749, vol. 2).pdf/233

 holding me fast by the hand, and gazing at me in a transport of fondness. Observing my recovery, he attempted to speak, and give vent to his impatience of hearing my voice again, to satisfy him once more that it was me: but the mightiness, and suddenness of the surprize continuing to stun him, choak'd his utterance: he could only stammer out a few broken, half-form'd, faultering accents, which my ears greedily drinking in, spelt, and put together so as to make out their sense. "After so long!——so cruel!—an absence,—my dearest Fanny!— Can it? can it be you?"—stifling me at the same time with kisses, that stopping my mouth, at once prevented the answer that he panted for, and encreas'd the delicious disorder, in which all my senses were rapturously lost. Amidst, however, this croud of ideas, and all blissful ones, there obtruded only one cruel doubt, that poison'd nearly all this transcendent happiness: and what was it, but my dread of its being too excessive to be real? I trem-