consent to wait through
a year of probation, furnished me with weapons against you, which I
employed to the most unscrupulous purpose. I can picture to myself what
would be your indignation and your horror, if I fully described the use
which I made of the position in which your compliance with her father's
conditions placed you towards Margaret. I spare you this avowal--it
would be useless now. Consider me what you please; denounce my conduct
in any terms you like: my justification will always be the same. I
was the injured man, you were the aggressor; I was righting myself by
getting back a possession of which you had robbed me, and any means were
sanctified by such an end as that.

"But my success, so far, was of little avail, in itself; against the
all-powerful counter-attraction which you possessed. Contemptible, or
not, you still had this superiority over me--you could make a fine
lady of her. From that fact sprang the ambition which all my influence,
dating as it did from her childhood, could not destroy. There, was
fastened the main-spring which regulated her selfish devotion to you,
and which it was next to impossible to snap asunder. I never made the
attempt.

"The scheme which I proposed to her, when she was fully prepared to hear
it, and to conceal that she had heard it, left her free to enjoy all the
social advantages which your alliance could bestow--free to ride in her
carriage, and go into her father's shop (that was one of her ambitions!)
as a new customer added to his aristocratic connection--free even to
become one of your family, unsuspected, in case your rash marriage was
forgiven. Your credulity rendered the execution of this scheme easy.
In what manner it was to be carried out, and what object I proposed to
myself in framing it, I abstain from avowing; for the simple reason that
the discovery at which you arrived by following us on the night of the
party, made my plan abortive, and has obliged me since to renounce it. I
need only say, in this place, that it threatened your father as well as
you, and that Margaret recoiled from it at first--not from any horror of
the proposal, but through fear of discovery. Gradually, I overcame her
apprehensions: very gradually, for I was not thoroughly secure of her
devotion to my purpose, until your year of probation was nearly out.

"Through all that year, daily visitor as you were at North Villa,
you never suspected either of us! And yet, had you been one wh