he
rest; had you known it sooner you might now be the happy
husband of the woman whom I adore. _You_ too will know the
meaning of those horrible words _too late_, which I have
repeated to her in malice, and to myself in despair, till I
feel as if they would ring in my ears through an eternity of
misery. She wanted courage, she wanted opportunity, to accuse
herself of the involuntary act which resembled murder in its
results, and which, in the secret cogitations of her restless
soul, and excited imagination, assumed a form of guilt and of
terror which nothing could efface. _I_ kept her secret! I
forced Mrs. Tracy, (Alice's grandmother,) who was in my room,
on some matters of business at the time, to keep it too. I
devoted myself to my victim; I watched her continually; I read
each emotion of her soul; I soothed her terrors; I flattered
her; I made her believe, by a series of artful contrivances,
that _you_ were the possessor of her secret, and thus sought,
by fear, by distrust, by every pang which that belief
occasioned, to crush that passion, the dawn of which I had
detected with rage and despair. Under that impression, she saw
you depart with a resigned and sullen indifference; and for
some months I thought myself, if not loved, at least liked, to
a degree which justified my hopes and my designs. They were
cruelly disappointed;--a fatal engagement, an entanglement in
which guilt and folly had involved me, prevented my offering
myself to her in any way but that of urging her to a secret
marriage, which I proposed on the score of her uncle's
implacable opposition. She steadily refused to yield to my
passionate entreaties, and we parted with threats and
upbraidings on my part, and contempt and defiance on hers. I
was, of course, banished from Elmsley, and soon afterwards,
for the purpose of saving myself from a threatened and
disgraceful exposure, of a nature needless now to detail, I
made a victim of that gentle and perfect Alice, who has almost
as much reason as Ellen herself to curse the day on which I
crossed her path. When I met the latter again, in London, some
time after my marriage, I began to use that power which
accident had given me. She had then found out that you were
not, as she had imagined, aware of the event which had so
fearfully blighted her peace. I then avowed myself the
possessor of her secret; and alternately as a friend and as a
foe--by devotion one while, and by threats another--I forced
her