The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 392: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

370 REYNOLDS’ WORKS and regret for me, because I love you, Miss Ashton, and to lose your confidence — ”’ Here the wily Sagoonah stopped short, and the tears trickled slowly from her lustrous eyes, glistening like dia- monds upon her dark but smooth and polished cheeks. And then to the long ebon fringes of each upper lid did other tears hang quivering and sparkling, and her bosom seemed convulsed with stifling sobs, and her looks were bent so plaintively, so appealingly upon Christina, that the gen- erous heart of the young maiden was profoundly touched. “If for a moment I have wronged you, Sagoonah,’” she said, taking the ayah’s hand, — “‘ if with my English notions I have too harshly and suspiciously estimated your conduct, or, rather, if I have not known how to interpret it at all, but yet have fancied that you were not truthfully nor frankly explaining it, I beseech you to pardon me.”’ “Oh, now your kindness touches me even more than that transient suspicion on your part wounded me,” and as Sa- goonah thus spoke, she took Christina’s hand, pressed it first to her bosom, and then carried it to her lips. ‘‘ Yes, my dear Miss Ashton,” she continued, “ it was nought but the truth, — the sincere, the honest, the genuine truth that I was telling you. I am superstitious; can I be blamed for this weakness, if a weakness it be? ” ‘No, no, not blamed. But I must enlighten you, my poor Sagoonah,” said the amiable heroine of our tale. ‘‘ You need not apprehend that evil spirits will haunt one so good as your noble-hearted mistress. If there be evil spirits, the wicked alone have cause to tremble at them. It is not well, Sagoonah, to wander about in the dead of night as you are doing; others who know less of you than I—or, rather, who understand your disposition less — would conceive that you were troubled with a guilty conscience. Night is the time when the good sleep, or at least, when they remain in their beds, and it is the season when guilt walks abroad. The fancy is irresistibly led to associate frightful and hideous deeds with midnight wanderings — ”’ “Miss Ashton, Miss Ashton, you terrify me,’’ murmured the ayah, who was indeed conscience-stricken by the words which our heroine was thus addressing to her in a tone of mild and gentle solemnity. “ There is nought to terrify you in what I say,” answered ECORNICLIOO