flection of a minute), how am I convinced that my father is in the power of D'Alembert? may he not have said so merely for the purpose of frightening me into compliance with his wishes? should I not therefore be rash in the extreme if I doomed myself to misery without a conviction that my father's preservation depended on my doing so? But how can I doubt his veracity (proceeded she, wildly starting from the chair on which she had flung herself), how imagine he would ever make allegations he could not support? and yet, perhaps, he made them under the idea that I would never enquire into their truth: but shocked, appalled at the first intimation of danger to my father, promise at once to become the wife of his son: I will not then make that promise, till assured there is a necessity for doing so."
But how was she to receive this assurance? how—without enquiring from her father concerning the former events of his life? and, in making those enquiries, what pain-
