“The scheme which I proposed to her, when she was fully prepared to hear it, and to conceal that she had heard it, left her free to enjoy all the social advantages which your alliance could bestow—­free to ride in her carriage, and go into her father’s shop (that was one of her ambitions!) as a new customer added to his aristocratic connection—­free even to become one of your family, unsuspected, in case your rash marriage was forgiven.  Your credulity rendered the execution of this scheme easy.  In what manner it was to be carried out, and what object I proposed to myself in framing it, I abstain from avowing; for the simple reason that the discovery at which you arrived by following us on the night of the party, made my plan abortive, and has obliged me since to renounce it.  I need only say, in this place, that it threatened your father as well as you, and that Margaret recoiled from it at first—­not from any horror of the proposal, but through fear of discovery.  Gradually, I overcame her apprehensions:  very gradually, for I was not thoroughly secure of her devotion to my purpose, until your year of probation was nearly out.

“Through all that year, daily visitor as you were at North Villa, you never suspected either of us!  And yet, had you been one whit less infatuated, how many warnings you might have discovered, which, in spite of her duplicity and my caution, would then have shown themselves plainly enough to put you on your guard!  Those abrupt changes in her manner, those alternate fits of peevish silence and capricious gaiety, which sometimes displayed themselves even in your presence, had every one of them their meaning—­though you could not discern it.  Sometimes, they meant fear of discovery, sometimes fear of me:  now, they might be traced back to hidden contempt; now, to passions swelling under fancied outrage; now, to secret remembrance of disclosures I had just made, or eager anticipation of disclosures I had yet to reveal.  There were times at which every step of the way along which I was advancing was marked, faintly yet significantly, in her manner and her speech, could you only have interpreted them aright.  My first renewal of my old influence over her, my first words that degraded you in her eyes, my first successful pleading of my own cause against yours, my first appeal to those passions in her which I knew how to move, my first proposal to her of the whole scheme which I had matured in solitude, in the foreign country, by the banks of the great river—­all these separate and gradual advances on my part towards the end which I was vowed to achieve, were outwardly shadowed forth in her, consummate as were her capacities for deceit, and consummately as she learnt to use them against you.