But already he had begun to regard the deed as his executioner.  He dreaded meeting Clara.  The folly of having retained her stood before him.  How now to look on her and keep a sane resolution unwavering?  She tempted to the insane.  Had she been away, he could have walked through the performance composed by the sense of doing a duty to himself; perhaps faintly hating the poor wretch he made happy at last, kind to her in a manner, polite.  Clara’s presence in the house previous to the deed, and, oh, heaven! after it, threatened his wits.  Pride?  He had none; he cast it down for her to trample it; he caught it back ere it was trodden on.  Yes; he had pride:  he had it as a dagger in his breast:  his pride was his misery.  But he was too proud to submit to misery.  “What I do is right.”  He said the words, and rectitude smoothed his path, till the question clamoured for answer:  Would the world countenance and endorse his pride in Laetitia?  At one time, yes.  And now?  Clara’s beauty ascended, laid a beam on him.  We are on board the labouring vessel of humanity in a storm, when cries and countercries ring out, disorderliness mixes the crew, and the fury of self-preservation divides:  this one is for the ship, that one for his life.  Clara was the former to him, Laetitia the latter.  But what if there might not be greater safety in holding tenaciously to Clara than in casting her off for Laetitia?  No, she had done things to set his pride throbbing in the quick.  She had gone bleeding about first to one, then to another; she had betrayed him to Vernon, and to Mrs. Mountstuart; a look in the eyes of Horace De Craye said, to him as well:  to whom not?  He might hold to her for vengeance; but that appetite was short-lived in him if it ministered nothing to his purposes.  “I discard all idea of vengeance,” he said, and thrilled burningly to a smart in his admiration of the man who could be so magnanimous under mortal injury; for the more admirable he, the more pitiable.  He drank a drop or two of self-pity like a poison, repelling the assaults of public pity.  Clara must be given up.  It must be seen by the world that, as he felt, the thing he did was right.  Laocoon of his own serpents, he struggled to a certain magnificence of attitude in the muscular net of constrictions he flung around himself.  Clara must be given up.  Oh, bright Abominable!  She must be given up:  but not to one whose touch of her would be darts in the blood of the yielder, snakes in his bed:  she must be given up to an extinguisher; to be the second wife of an old-fashioned semi-recluse, disgraced in his first.  And were it publicly known that she had been cast off, and had fallen on old Vernon for a refuge, and part in spite, part in shame, part in desperation, part in a fit of good sense under the circumstances, espoused him, her beauty would not influence the world in its judgement.  The world would know what to think.  As the instinct of self-preservation whispered to Willoughby, the