“I had never hinted a word of my intentions towards her to Margaret; but she understood them well enough—­I was certain of that, from many indications which no man could mistake.  For reasons which will presently appear, I resolved not to explain myself until my return from Lyons.  My private object in going there, was to make interest secretly with Mr. Sherwin’s correspondents for a situation in their house.  I knew that when I made my proposals to Margaret, I must be prepared to act on them on the instant; I knew that her father’s fury when he discovered that I had been helping to educate his daughter only for myself, would lead him to any extremities; I knew that we must fly to some foreign country; and, lastly, I knew the importance of securing a provision for our maintenance, when we got there.  I had saved money, it is true—­nearly two-thirds of my salary, every year—­but had 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.