Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 135: what you’re looking at

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

118 REYNOLDS’ WORKS at the time, and she offered to receive me as a governess. She frankly told me that she was not very well off, and that she could not afford to give me a handsome salary, but my circumstances did not permit me to be overparticular, and I therefore accepted her proposition. She was a woman of about forty; her eldest son, whose Christian name was James, was just one and twenty, and she had four other children, two boys and two girls, whose ages ranged from ten to eighteen. She was a good-natured person, somewhat weak-minded, and entirely under the empire of her son James, who, I must observe, was a handsome young man. Her husband had been dead about eight months; he was a merchant, but had left his circumstances 1n a less flourish- ing condition than had been expected from his mode of life. ‘“ He had some little property at Barcelona in Spain, and it required the widow’s presence there for her to take possession of it. She had arrived from England on her way thither; and, as I found, more from compassion in respect to myself than because her views were sufficiently settled to enable her to engage a governess at the time, she received me into her family. “In a few weeks we set off by the diligence toward the Spanish frontier. I soon found that James Knight had taken it into his head to make a conquest of me, if possibie, and not in an honourable way. When unperceived by his mother, he besieged me with attentions, and even in her presence he sometimes looked and spoke in a manner that it was impossible to misunderstand. On these occasions I saw that she reproved him with a glance, for which, however, he cared but little. She was, however, soon satisfied that he received no encouragement from me, for I gave him to understand as plainly as I could that his attentions were most disagreeable. But he persevered in them, and on one occasion it became necessary for me to resent his imperti- nence with a sound box on the ears, which I hesitated not to bestow. He was of an evil disposition, treacherous, malignant, and spiteful to a degree; and finding that so far from making any tender impression on me, I treated him in this manner, he menaced me with his looks. For these, however, I cared but little, and deported myself toward him with aversion and contempt. He grew sullen and morose, Gomichbooks (E(0)