not saved enough for two.
Accordingly, I left England to push my own interests, as well as my
employer's; left it, confident that my short absence would not weaken
the result of years of steady influence over Margaret. The sequel showed
that, cautious and calculating as I was, I had nevertheless overlooked
the chances against me, which my own experience of her vanity and
duplicity ought to have enabled me thoroughly to foresee.

"Well: I had been some time at Lyons; had managed my employer's business
(from first to last, I was faithful, as I had engaged to be, to his
commercial interests); and had arranged my own affairs securely and
privately. Already, I was looking forward, with sensations of happiness
which were new to me, to my return and to the achievement of the
one success, the solitary triumph of my long life of humiliation and
disaster, when a letter arrived from Mr. Sherwin. It contained the news
of your private marriage, and of the extraordinary conditions that had
been attached to it with your consent.

"Other people were in the room with me when I read that letter; but my
manner betrayed nothing to them. My hand never trembled when I folded
the sheet of paper again; I was not a minute late in attending a
business engagement which I had accepted; the slightest duties of
other kinds which I had to do, I rigidly fulfilled. Never did I more
thoroughly and fairly earn the evening's leisure by the morning's work,
than I earned it that day.

"Leaving the town at the close of afternoon, I walked on till I came to
a solitary place on the bank of the great river which runs near Lyons.
There I opened the letter for the second time, and read it through again
slowly, with no necessity now for self-control, because no human being
was near to look at me. There I read your name, constantly repeated in
every line of writing; and knew that the man who, in my absence, had
stepped between me and my prize--the man who, in his insolence of youth,
and birth, and fortune, had snatched from me the one long-delayed reward
for twenty years of misery, just as my hands were stretched forth to
grasp it, was the son of that honourable and high-born gentleman who had
given my father to the gallows, and had made me the outcast of my social
privileges for life.

"The sun was setting when I looked up from the letter; flashes of
rose-light leapt on the leaping river; the birds were winging nestward
to the distant trees, and the ghostly st