Page:The Adventures of David Simple (1904).djvu/316

. One of them, who was my aunt by the mother's side, had some of her husband's family settled in England. She proposed to carry me thither, that I might remove from the scene of my misfortunes, I went with her; but my ill fate pursued me. We had not been in London a week before she caught the small-pox, and died. Having myself never had that distemper, I was obliged to quit the house she was in, and came to lodge here. "As soon as I have settled some affairs which she had in this country, I shall return into France, and execute my former intention of taking the veil; a religious life being the only relief to such sorrows as mine." Here Isabelle ceased, and it was some time before any of the company could make her an answer. At last David cried out, "How unhappy am I to meet with a person of so much merit, under a sorrow in which it is impossible for me to hope to afford her the least consolation!" Cynthia, and the rest of the company, thanked Isabelle for informing them of her story; and said, if they had thought what her griefs were, they would not have asked her to have put herself to the pain her obliging them must unavoidably have cost her. "Alas!" replied Isabelle, "had my sorrows been less piercing, perhaps I should not have had resolution enough to have related them; but the excess of my affliction has made me so entirely give up the world, that the despair of any future enjoyments, and the very impossibility I find of ever meeting with any consolation, has in some measure calmed me, and prevents those violent agitations of the mind which, whatever people may fancy, are always owing to some latent hope of happiness." This whole company were so sensible that Isabelle was in the right in her resolutions of retiring from a world in which it was impossible for her to meet with