to endure my presence,--to tolerate the expression of a
passion, against which her heart revolted, but which she dared
not peremptorily repel. I employed every art which cunning can
devise to entangle and to bind her. In Mrs. Tracy's knowledge
of her secret, and violent enmity against her, I held an
engine which I skilfully turned to my purpose. I bound her by
an oath never to reveal to you the history of Julia's death.
She pronounced it; but even while she protested that she would
never marry you, she declared to me, with the accents of
intense passion, that though she had refused, she adored you,
and that she would rather die at your feet, than live by my
side.

"After betraying her feelings in a moment of extraordinary
agitation, she found herself almost involuntarily engaged to
you; she wrote to me, and threw herself on my mercy. My
feelings and my conduct, at that time, appear strange to
myself. I was excluded from her uncle's house, and that
intercourse with her, which was dearer to me than existence,
was interrupted and thwarted in every way. By one effort, one
great sacrifice, I regained her confidence, and re-established
myself in that forfeited intimacy, at the same time that I
bound her by fresh ties of fear and obligation. Perhaps I was
also touched by her terrible situation: but be that as it may,
I _allowed_ her to marry you; and by some concessions on my
own part to her inveterate enemy, that old woman,--whose
vindictive malice has ruined and undone us all,--I bought her
silence, and once more shielded Ellen from disgrace and
exposure.

"I need not go into further details. You now can trace for
yourself the whole course of my relentless persecution, and of
her long and bitter struggles. From first to last,--from the
hour she pledged her faith to you at the altar, to that in
which you surprised her at my feet,--she has been true to you.
I say it even now, with jealous rage; for the fierce love with
which I have loved her is still smouldering in my breast, and
will only die when I die; I say it with the agony of death in
my soul,--with the vision of an approaching eternity before
me,--she has been true to you: she has loved you as I loved
her; and when she clung to my feet, and vainly sued for mercy
at my hands, it was to implore that I would suffer her to
reveal the truth to you, the acknowledgment of which might
then have saved her. She is dying now, and I have not long to
live. She has never loved