The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

This letter forced an answer from him, by which, though I found I was

to be abandoned, yet I found he had sent a letter to me some time

before, desiring me to go down to the Bath again. Its contents I shall

come to presently.

It is true that sick-beds are the time when such correspondences as

this are looked on with different countenances, and seen with other

eyes than we saw them with, or than they appeared with before. My

lover had been at the gates of death, and at the very brink of

eternity; and, it seems, had been struck with a due remorse, and with

sad reflections upon his past life of gallantry and levity; and among

the rest, criminal correspondence with me, which was neither more nor

less than a long-continued life of adultery, and represented itself as

it really was, not as it had been formerly thought by him to be, and he

looked upon it now with a just and religious abhorrence.

I cannot but observe also, and leave it for the direction of my sex in

such cases of pleasure, that whenever sincere repentance succeeds such

a crime as this, there never fails to attend a hatred of the object;

and the more the affection might seem to be before, the hatred will be

the more in proportion. It will always be so, indeed it can be no

otherwise; for there cannot be a true and sincere abhorrence of the

offence, and the love to the cause of it remain; there will, with an

abhorrence of the sin, be found a detestation of the fellow-sinner; you

can expect no other.

I found it so here, though good manners and justice in this gentleman

kept him from carrying it on to any extreme but the short history of

his part in this affair was thus: he perceived by my last letter, and

by all the rest, which he went for after, that I was not gone to Bath,

that his first letter had not come to my hand; upon which he write me

this following:-'MADAM,--I am surprised that my letter, dated the 8th of last month,

did not come to your hand; I give you my word it was delivered at your

lodgings, and to the hands of your maid.

'I need not acquaint you with what has been my condition for some time

past; and how, having been at the edge of the grave, I am, by the

unexpected and undeserved mercy of Heaven, restored again. In the

condition I have been in, it cannot be strange to you that our unhappy

correspondence had not been the least of the burthens which lay upon my

conscience. I need say no more; those things that must be repented of,

must be also reformed.