I say, you had taken either of these courses, I should still have been powerless against you.  But you remained faithful to your promise, faithful to the condition, faithful to the ill-directed modesty of your love; and that very fidelity put you in my power.  A pure-minded girl would have loved you a thousand times better for acting as you did—­but Margaret Sherwin was not a pure-minded girl, not a maidenly girl:  I have looked into her thoughts, and I know it.

“Such were your chances against me; and such was the manner in which you misused them.  On my side, I had indefatigable patience; personal advantages equal, with the exception of birth and age, to yours:  long-established influence; freedom to be familiar; and more than all, that stealthy, unflagging strength of purpose which only springs from the desire of revenge.  I first thoroughly tested your character, and discovered on what points it was necessary for me to be on my guard against you, when you took shelter under my roof from the storm.  If your father had been with you on that night, there were moments, while the tempest was wrought to its full fury, when, if my voice could have called the thunder down on the house to crush it and every one in it to atoms, I would have spoken the word, and ended the strife for all of us.  The wind, the hail, and the lightning maddened my thoughts of your father and you—­I was nearly letting you see it, when that flash came between us as we parted at my door.

“How I gained your confidence, you know; and you know also, how I contrived to make you use me, afterwards, as the secret friend who procured you privileges with Margaret which her father would not grant at your own request.  This, at the outset, secured me from suspicion on your part; and I had only to leave it to your infatuation to do the rest.  With you my course was easy—­with her it was beset by difficulties; but I overcame them.  Your fatal consent to wait through a year of probation, furnished me with weapons against you, which I employed to the most unscrupulous purpose.  I can picture to myself what would be your indignation and your horror, if I fully described the use which I made of the position in which your compliance with her father’s conditions placed you towards Margaret.  I spare you this avowal—­it would be useless now.  Consider me what you please; denounce my conduct in any terms you like:  my justification will always be the same.  I was the injured man, you were the aggressor; I was righting myself by getting back a possession of which you had robbed me, and any means were sanctified by such an end as that.

“But my success, so far, was of little avail, in itself; against the all-powerful counter-attraction which you possessed.  Contemptible, or not, you still had this superiority over me—­you could make a fine lady of her.  From that fact sprang the ambition which all my influence, dating as it did from her childhood, could not destroy.  There, was fastened the main-spring which regulated her selfish devotion to you, and which it was next to impossible to snap asunder.  I never made the attempt.