The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

He held me in talk so long, till at last he drew me out of the raffling

place to the shop-door, and then to a walk in the cloister, still

talking of a thousand things cursorily without anything to the purpose.

At last he told me that, without compliment, he was charmed with my

company, and asked me if I durst trust myself in a coach with him; he

told me he was a man of honour, and would not offer anything to me

unbecoming him as such. I seemed to decline it a while, but suffered

myself to be importuned a little, and then yielded.

I was at a loss in my thoughts to conclude at first what this gentleman

designed; but I found afterwards he had had some drink in his head, and

that he was not very unwilling to have some more. He carried me in the

coach to the Spring Garden, at Knightsbridge, where we walked in the

gardens, and he treated me very handsomely; but I found he drank very

freely. He pressed me also to drink, but I declined it.

Hitherto he kept his word with me, and offered me nothing amiss. We

came away in the coach again, and he brought me into the streets, and

by this time it was near ten o'clock at night, and he stopped the coach

at a house where, it seems, he was acquainted, and where they made no

scruple to show us upstairs into a room with a bed in it. At first I

seemed to be unwilling to go up, but after a few words I yielded to

that too, being willing to see the end of it, and in hope to make

something of it at last. As for the bed, etc., I was not much

concerned about that part.

Here he began to be a little freer with me than he had promised; and I

by little and little yielded to everything, so that, in a word, he did

what he pleased with me; I need say no more. All this while he drank

freely too, and about one in the morning we went into the coach again.

The air and the shaking of the coach made the drink he had get more up

in his head than it was before, and he grew uneasy in the coach, and

was for acting over again what he had been doing before; but as I

thought my game now secure, I resisted him, and brought him to be a

little still, which had not lasted five minutes but he fell fast asleep.

I took this opportunity to search him to a nicety. I took a gold

watch, with a silk purse of gold, his fine full-bottom periwig and

silver-fringed gloves, his sword and fine snuff-box, and gently opening

the coach door, stood ready to jump out while the coach was going on;

but the coach stopped in the narrow street beyond Temple Bar to let

another coach pass, I got softly out, fastened the door again, and gave

my gentleman and the coach the slip both together, and never heard more

of them.