his utter baseness by causing
her to be informed that his first wife was still living."

"Upon my honor, sir, I believed, when I married Miss Willoughby, that I
was a widower."

"Your _honor!_ But except to prove that I _do_ thoroughly know and
appreciate the person I am addressing, I will not bandy words with you.
After that terrible disclosure--if, indeed, it be a disclosure, not an
invention--Ah, you start at that"

"At your insolence, sir; not at your senseless surmises."

"Time and the law will show. After, I repeat, this terrible disclosure or
invention, you, not content with obtaining from your victim's generosity
a positive promise that she would not send you to the hulks"--

"Sir, have a care."

"Pooh! I say, not content with exacting this promise from your victim,
you, with your wife, or accomplice, threatened not only to take her child
from her, but to lock her up in a madhouse, unless she subscribed a
paper, confessing that she knew, when you espoused her, that you were a
married man. Now, sir, do I, or do I not, thoroughly know who and what
the man is I am addressing?"

"Sir," returned Harlowe, recovering his audacity somewhat. "Spite of all
your hectoring and abuse, I defy you to obtain proof--legal
proof--whether what Edith has heard is true or false. The affair may
perhaps be arranged; let her return with me."

"You know she would die first; but it is quite useless to prolong this
conversation; and I again request you to leave this house."

"If Miss Willoughby would accept an allowance"--

The cool audacity of this proposal to make me an instrument in
compromising a felony exasperated me beyond all bounds. I rang the bell
violently, and desired the servant who answered it to show Mr. Harlowe
out of the house. Finding further persistence useless, the baffled
villain snatched up his hat, and with a look and gesture of rage and
contempt, hurried out of the apartment.

The profession of a barrister necessarily begets habits of coolness and
reflection under the most exciting circumstances; but, I confess, that in
this instance my ordinary equanimity was so much disturbed, that it was
some time before I could command sufficient composure to reason calmly
upon the strange revelations made to me by Edith, and the nature of the
measures necessary to adopt in order to clear up the mystery attaching to
them. She persisted in her refusal to have recourse to legal measures
with a view to the punishment