“Please. This is difficult. Let me say my piece. The short of it is, since you left the island, my affections have become engaged elsewhere. Father did not know of it, and I now see it was very wrong in me to keep my own counsel in this matter—I should have made a clean thing of it and told him from the beginning—but in the event, I did not do so, the lady in the case being even younger than yourself and not of an age for handfasting.
