ery committed in the register of the church.

My head turned giddy--I held by the desk to keep myself from falling.
Of all the suspicions which had struck me in relation to that desperate
man, not one had been near the truth.

The idea that he was not Sir Percival Glyde at all, that he had no more
claim to the baronetcy and to Blackwater Park than the poorest labourer
who worked on the estate, had never once occurred to my mind. At one
time I had thought he might be Anne Catherick's father--at another time
I had thought he might have been Anne Catherick's husband--the offence
of which he was really guilty had been, from first to last, beyond the
widest reach of my imagination.

The paltry means by which the fraud had been effected, the magnitude
and daring of the crime that it represented, the horror of the
consequences involved in its discovery, overwhelmed me. Who could
wonder now at the brute-restlessness of the wretch's life--at his
desperate alternations between abject duplicity and reckless
violence--at the madness of guilty distrust which had made him imprison
Anne Catherick in the Asylum, and had given him over to the vile
conspiracy against his wife, on the bare suspicion that the one and the
other knew his terrible secret? The disclosure of that secret might, in
past years, have hanged him--might now transport him for life. The
disclosure of that secret, even if the sufferers by his deception
spared him the penalties of the law, would deprive him at one blow of
the name, the rank, the estate, the whole social existence that he had
usurped. This was the Secret, and it was mine! A word from me, and
house, lands, baronetcy, were gone from him for ever--a word from me,
and he was driven out into the world, a nameless, penniless, friendless
outcast! The man's whole future hung on my lips--and he knew it by this
time as certainly as I did!

That last thought steadied me. Interests far more precious than my own
depended on the caution which must now guide my slightest actions.
There was no possible treachery which Sir Percival might not attempt
against me. In the danger and desperation of his position he would be
staggered by no risks, he would recoil at no crime--he would literally
hesitate at nothing to save himself.

I considered for a minute. My first necessity was to secure positive
evidence in writing of the discovery that I had just made, and in the
event of any personal misadventure happening to me