n.

"Among the thousand schemes for retribution which had chased each other
across my mind, the death of my victim was only the ulterior object.
Death, indeed--the pang of one moment--appeared to me but very feeble
justice for the life of lingering and restless anguish to which his
treachery had condemned me; but my penance, my doom, I could have
forgiven: it was the fate of a more innocent and injured being which
irritated the sting and fed the venom of my revenge. That revenge no
ordinary punishment could appease. If fanaticism can only be satisfied
by the rack and the flames, you may readily conceive a like unappeasable
fury in a hatred so deadly, so concentrated, and so just as mine; and if
fanaticism persuades itself into a virtue, so also did my hatred.

"The scheme which I resolved upon was to attach Tyrrell more and more
to the gaming-table, to be present at his infatuation, to feast my eyes
upon the feverish intensity of his suspense; to reduce him, step
by step, to the lowest abyss of poverty; to glut my soul with the
abjectness and humiliation of his penury; to strip him of all aid,
consolation, sympathy, and friendship; to follow him, unseen, to his
wretched and squalid home; to mark the struggles of the craving nature
with the loathing pride; and, finally, to watch the frame wear, the eye
sink, the lip grow livid, and all the terrible and torturing progress
of gnawing want to utter starvation. Then, in that last state, but not
before, I might reveal myself; stand by the hopeless and succourless
bed of death; shriek out in the dizzy ear a name, which could treble
the horrors of remembrance; snatch from the struggling and agonizing
conscience the last plank, the last straw, to which, in its madness, it
could cling, and blacken the shadows of departing life, by opening to
the shuddering sense the threshold of an impatient and yawning hell.

"Hurried away by the unhallowed fever of these projects, I thought
of nothing but their accomplishment. I employed Thornton, who still
maintained his intimacy with Tyrrell, to decoy him more and more to the
gambling-house; and, as the unequal chances of the public table were
not rapid enough in their termination to consummate the ruin even of an
impetuous and vehement gamester like Tyrrell so soon as my impatience
desired, Thornton took every opportunity of engaging him in private
play, and accelerating my object by the unlawful arts of which he was
master. My enemy was e