Lady. Ah, Mr. Mirabell, this is small comfort, the detection of this affair.

Mira. O in good time—Your leave for the other offender and penitent to appear, madam.

SCENE XII

[To them] Waitwell with a box of writings.

Lady. O Sir Rowland—Well, rascal.

Wait. What your ladiship pleases.—I have brought the black box at last, madam.

Mira. Give it me. Madam, you remember your promise.

Lady. Ay, dear sir.

Mira. Where are the gentlemen?

Wait. At hand, sir, rubbing their eyes,—just risen from sleep.

Fain. S’death, what’s this to me? I’ll not wait your private concerns.

SCENE XIII

[To them] Petulant, Witwoud.

Pet. How now? what’s the matter? who’s hand’s out?

Wit. Hey day! what, are you all got together, like players at the end of the last act?

Mira. You may remember, gentlemen, I once requested your hands as witnesses to a certain parchment.

Wit. Ay, I do, my hand I remember—Petulant set his mark.

Mira. You wrong him, his name is fairly written, as shall appear—You do not remember, gentlemen, anything of what that parchment contained?

[Undoing the box.

Wit. No.

Pet. Not I. I writ, I read nothing.

Mira. Very well, now you shall know—Madam, your promise.

Lady. Ay, ay, sir, upon my honour.

Mira. Mr. Fainall, it is now time that you should know that your lady, while she was at her own disposal, and before you had by your insinuations wheadled her out of a pretended settlement of the greatest part of her fortune—

Fain. Sir! pretended!

Mira. Yes, sir. I say that this lady while a widow, having it seems received some cautions respecting your inconstancy and tyranny of temper, which from her own partial opinion and fondness of you she could never have suspected—she did, I say, by the wholesome advice of friends and of sages learned in the laws of this land, deliver this same as her act and deed to me in trust, and to the uses within