“Do you remember noticing, on your return from the country, how ill Margaret looked, and how ill I looked?  We had some interviews during your absence, at which I spoke such words to her as would have left their mark on the face of a Jezebel, or a Messalina.  Have you forgotten how often, during the latter days of your year of expectation, I abruptly left the room after you had called me in to bear you company in your evening readings?  My pretext was sudden illness; and illness it was, but not of the body.  As the time approached, I felt less and less secure of my own caution and patience.  With you, indeed, I might still have considered myself safe:  it was the presence of Mrs. Sherwin that drove me from the room.  Under that woman’s fatal eye I shrank, when the last days drew near—­I, who had defied her detection, and stood firmly on my guard against her sleepless, silent, deadly vigilance, for months and months—­gave way as the end approached!  I knew that she had once or twice spoken strangely to you, and I dreaded lest her wandering, incoherent words might yet take in time a recognisable direction, a palpable shape.  They did not; the instinct of terror bound her tongue to the last.  Perhaps, even if she had spoken plainly, you would not have believed her; you would have been still true to yourself and to your confidence in Margaret.  Enemy as I am to you, enemy as I will be to the day of your death, I will do you justice for the past:—­Your love for that girl was a love which even the purest and best of women could never have thoroughly deserved.

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“My letter is nearly done:  my retrospect is finished.  I have brought it down to the date of events, about which you know as much as I do.  Accident conducted you to a discovery which, otherwise, you might not have made, perhaps for months, perhaps not at all, until I had led you to it of my own accord.  I say accident, positively; knowing that from first to last I trusted no third person.  What you know, you knew by accident alone.

“But for that chance discovery, you would have seen me bring her back to North Villa at the appointed time, in my care, just as she went out.  I had no dread of her meeting you.  But enough of her!  I shall dispose of her future, as I had resolved to dispose of it years ago; careless how she may be affected when she first sees the hideous alteration which your attack has wrought in me.  Enough, I say, of the Sherwins—­father, mother, and daughter—­your destiny lies not with them, but with me.

“Do you still exult in having deformed me in every feature, in having given me a face to revolt every human being who looks at me?  Do you triumph in the remembrance of this atrocity, as you triumphed in the acting of it—­believing that you had destroyed my future with Margaret, in destroying my very identity as a man?  I tell you, that with the hour when I leave this hospital your day of triumph will be over, and your day of expiation will begin—­never to end till the death of one of us.  You shall live—­refined educated gentleman as you are—­to wish, like a ruffian, that you had killed me; and your father shall live to wish it too.