Page:The Female Advocate.djvu/167

vived my senses, and awakened my reason. My reason, my memory, my anguish, and despair returned together. Every circumstance of my past life was present to my mind; but most the idea of my faithless lover, and my criminal love tortured my imagination and rent my bleeding heart, which, in spite of all its guilt and all its wrongs, retained the tenderest and most ardent affection for its undoer. This unguarded affection, which was the effect of a gentle and kind nature, heightened the anguish of resentment, and compleated my misery. In vain did I call off my thoughts from this gloomy retrospect, and hope to find a gleam of comfort in my future prospects. They were still more dreadful: poverty, attended by infamy, and want groaning under the cruel hand of oppression, and the taunts of insolence were before my eyes. I, who had once been the darling and the pride of indulgent parents, who had once been beloved, respected, and admired, was now the outcast of human nature; despised and avoided by all who had ever loved me, by all whom I had most loved!