he blindness had wrought outward as well as inwardly, so that he
was even unable, during considerable portions of his life, to tell
whether things took place outside or inside him. Nor did this trouble
him--he was past caring. He would argue that what equally affected him
had an equal right to be by him regarded as existent. He paid no heed
to the different natures of the two kinds of existence, their different
laws, and the different demands they made upon the two consciousnesses;
he had in fact, by a long course of disobedience growing to utter
disuse of conscience, arrived nearly at non-individuality. In regard to
what was outside him he was but a mirror, in regard to what was inside
him a mere vessel of imperfectly interacting forces. And now his
capacities and incapacities together had culminated in a hideous plot,
in which it would be hard to say whether the folly, the crime, or the
cunning predominated: he had made up his mind that, if the daughter of
his brother refused to wed her cousin, and so carry out what he
asserted to have been the declared wish of her father, she should go
after her father, and leave her property to the next heir, so that if
not in one way then in another the law of nature might be fulfilled,
and title and property united without the intervention of a marriage.
As to any evil that therein might be imagined to befall his niece, he
quoted the words of Hamlet--"Since no man has ought of what he leaves,
what is't to leave betimes?"--she would be no worse than she must have
been when the few years of her natural pilgrimage were of necessity
over: the difference to her was not worth thinking of beside the
difference to the family! At the same time perhaps a scare might serve,
and she would consent to marry Forgue to escape a frightful end!

The moment Donal was gone, he sent Forgue to London, and set himself to
overcome the distrust of him which he could not but see had for some
time been growing in her. With the sweet prejudices of a loving nature
to assist him, he soon prevailed so far that, without much entreaty,
she consented to accompany him to London--for a month or so, he said,
while Davie was gone. The proposal had charms for her: she had been
there with her father when a mere child, and never since. She wrote to
Donal to let him know: how it was that her letter never reached him, it
is hardly needful to inquire.

The earl, in order, he said, to show his recognition of her sweet
compl