The Works of George W. M. Reynolds — page 400: what you’re looking at

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

MR. SYCAMORE | 383 taken with her. Moreover, he had believed that she had detested the duke on account of that iniquitous affair of which they had been speaking. How, then, was it that her virtue had succumbed? How had her aversion been changed into love? “Do not think, Mr. Ashton,” she presently resumed, “that I have been wilfully and wantonly frail. If that were the case, I should not be addressing you in such a manner. No, with shame should I do my best to conceal my fault. Can you not understand me? I was the victim of the most diabolical atrocity, and I will be signally revenged.”’ Christian was more and more astonished at what he heard, but it was a point on which he would not ask questions; he could only listen to just so much as Amy Sutton might choose to reveal to him. “ Perhaps you consider it indelicate,”’ she went on to say, “that I should make such a revelation to one of the opposite sex. But it is because you already know so much of the villainy of Marchmont’s character, and because we were both as it were mixed up in a transaction which so signally exposed his baseness and his turpitude, and perhaps, too, it is a relief to my goaded feelings to be enabled to speak of my wrongs to one who knows their author so well, and knows likewise how fully capable he is of inflicting any wrong, even the worst and most flagrant that one fellow creature can sustain at the hands of another. It was shortly after the return of the family from Oaklands to Belgrave Square. He made an overture to me; I rejected it with scorn and in- dignation. He repeated it, he displayed gold before my eyes, and still I rejected his advances with abhorrence. I threat- ened to leave my situation the very next day, and to explain to the duchess wherefore I left — ”’ Amy Sutton paused for a minute; her countenance was perfectly livid with the workings of her feelings and the deep sense of her wrongs. “That same night,’ she continued, in a voice so low that it was barely audible, and after having flung another glance toward the slumberer in the corner, — ‘‘ that very night I was awakened from my sleep by the sensation of something poured between my lips, but between that awakening and a sinking into a state of perfect unconsciousness there was only a moment’s interval, so that it appears like a dream when (FO) m \ COnnIElOoOolks