o attempt to deceive me," I proceeded. "I have spoken
with the head partner of the house of Van Brandt at Amsterdam, and I
know exactly what your position is. Your pride must bend low enough to
take from my hands the means of subsistence for yourself and your child.
If I had died in England--"

I stopped. The unexpressed idea in my mind was to tell her that she
would inherit a legacy under my will, and that she might quite as
becomingly take money from me in my life-time as take it from my
executors after my death. In forming this thought into words, the
associations which it called naturally into being revived in me the
memory of my contemplated suicide in the Greenwater lake. Mingling with
the remembrance thus aroused, there rose in me unbidden, a temptation so
overpoweringly vile, and yet so irresistible in the state of my mind at
the moment, that it shook me to the soul. "You have nothing to live for,
now that she has refused to be yours," the fiend in me whispered. "Take
your leap into the next world, and make the woman whom you love take it
with you!" While I was still looking at her, while my last words to her
faltered on my lips, the horrible facilities for the perpetration of
the double crime revealed themselves enticingly to my view. My boat was
moored in the one part of the decaying harbor in which deep water still
lay at the foot of the quay. I had only to induce her to follow me when
I stepped on the deck, to seize her in my arms, and to jump overboard
with her before she could utter a cry for help. My drowsy sailors, as I
knew by experience, were hard to wake, and slow to move even when they
were roused at last. We should both be drowned before the youngest and
the quickest of them could get up from his bed and make his way to the
deck. Yes! We should both be struck together out of the ranks of the
living at one and the same moment. And why not? She who had again and
again refused to be my wife--did she deserve that I should leave her
free to go back, perhaps, for the second time to Van Brandt? On the
evening when I had saved her from the waters of the Scotch river, I
had made myself master of her fate. She had tried to destroy herself
by drowning; she should drown now, in the arms of the man who had once
thrown himself between her and death!

Self-abandoned to such atrocious reasoning as this, I stood face to face
with her, and returned deliberately to my unfinished sentence.

"If I had died in England,