The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 91: what you’re looking at

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

72 REYNOLDS’ WORKS entreat that you will not talk to me in this distracting, fright- ful way,’ and Bertram, falling on his knees upon the stone margin of the fountain’s reservoir, took her hand and pressed it to his lips, but the next instant dropping it — nay, more, even tossing it away from him — he started up, exclaiming in violent excitement, ‘‘ That hand is another’s. It is sacrilege in me to touch it.” Eliza’s tears fell fast and bitterly. She would not have withdrawn her hand of her own accord, — at least not so abruptly as he had flung it from him. She was shocked, she was hurt, she was wounded; the affliction which that poor creature endured in those rending moments was such as no man, even the most vindictive, could wish his mortal enemy to undergo. “Pardon me, Eliza,’’ said Bertram, in a tone of tenderest contrition; “‘l was rude—I was brutal. But, heavens! I am not the master of myself,’’ and again he pressed his feverish hand to his wildly throbbing brows. ‘“ Let me say a few words of explanation,” he resumed, after awhile, and speaking in a more collected manner. “ By a miracle — or by almost one — I was rescued from a watery grave in the depths of the Potomac. I knew that the report of an ac- cident in which so many lives were lost — indeed all save one — would be copied from the American into the English newspapers, and when recovered from the almost fatal illness of many weeks into which the shock and horror of the calamity plunged me, I lost no time in writing to your father. Not a doubt was in my mind but that your fears would have been relieved as to myself, long before that letter could reach England, but if not, it was beyond the power of human conception to suppose that your father would keep you in that dark, dreadful belief of my death. Oh, Eliza, how I counted the months, the weeks, the days, the hours, that were to elapse ere I beheld you again! Oh, how I cherished your image! Never man loved as I loved — never, never.” He turned abruptly aside, and his convulsive sobbings ‘smote upon Eliza’s ears, striking her very brain as if with a succession of heaviest blows, impaling her heart upon the stake of indescribable agony. And yet she dared not stretch out a hand to touch him, to awaken him as it were from that nightmare of hideous woe. She remembered that she was Gomicboo Ss (E(0)