“The sun was setting when I looked up from the letter; flashes of rose-light leapt on the leaping river; the birds were winging nestward to the distant trees, and the ghostly stillness of night was sailing solemnly over earth and sky, as the first thought of the vengeance I would have on father and son began to burn fiercely at my heart, to move like a new life within me, to whisper to my spirit—­Wait:  be patient; they are both in your power; you can now foul the father’s name as the father fouled yours—­you can yet thwart the son, as the son has thwarted you.

“In the few minutes that passed, while I lingered in that lonely place after reading the letter, I imagined the whole scheme which it afterwards took a year to execute.  I laid the whole plan against you and your father, the first half of which, through the accident that led you to your discovery, has alone been carried out.  I believed then, as I believe now, that I stood towards you both in the place of an injured man, whose right it was, in self-defence and self-assertion, to injure you.  Judged by your ideas, this may read wickedly; but to me, after having lived and suffered as I have, the modern common-places current in the world are so many brazen images which society impudently worships—­like the Jews of old—­in the face of living Truth.

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“Let us get back to England.

“That evening, when we met for the first time, did you observe that Margaret was unusually agitated before I came in?  I detected some change, the moment I saw her.  Did you notice that I avoided speaking to her, or looking at her? it was because I was afraid to do so.  I saw that, with my return, my old influence over her was coming back:  and I still believe that, hypocritical and heartless though she was, and blinded though you were by your passion for her, she would unconsciously have betrayed everything to you on that evening, if I had not acted as I did.  Her mother, too! how her mother watched me from the moment when I came in!

“Afterwards, while you were trying hard to open, undetected, the sealed history of my early life, I was warily discovering from Margaret all that I desired to know.  I say ‘warily,’ but the word poorly expresses my consummate caution and patience, at that time.  I never put myself in her power, never risked offending, or frightening, or revolting her; never lost an opportunity of bringing her back to her old habits of familiarity; and, more than all, never gave her mother a single opportunity of detecting me.  This was the sum of what I gathered up, bit by bit, from secret and scattered investigations, persevered in through many weeks.