“Do you call this a very madness of malignity and revenge?  It is the only occupation in life for which your mutilation of me has left me fit; and I accept it, as work worthy of my deformity.  In the prospect of watching how you bear this hunting through life, that never quite hunts you down; how long you resist the poison-influence, as slow as it is sure, of a crafty tongue that cannot be silenced, of a denouncing presence that cannot be fled, of a damning secret torn from you and exposed afresh each time you have hidden it—­there is the promise of a nameless delight which it sometimes fevers, sometimes chills my blood to think of.  Lying in this place at night, in those hours of darkness and stillness when the surrounding atmosphere of human misery presses heavy on me in my heavy sleep, prophecies of dread things to come between us, trouble my spirit in dreams.  At those times, I know, and shudder in knowing, that there is something besides the motive of retaliation, something less earthly and apparent than that, which urges me horribly and supernaturally to link myself to you for life; which makes me feel as the bearer of a curse that shall follow you; as the instrument of a fatality pronounced against you long ere we met—­a fatality beginning before our fathers were parted by the hangman; perpetuating itself in you and me; ending who shall say how, or when?

“Beware of comforting yourself with a false security, by despising my words, as the wild words of a madman, dreaming of the perpetration of impossible crimes.  Throughout this letter I have warned you of what you may expect; because I will not assail you at disadvantage, as you assailed me; because it is my pleasure to ruin you, openly resisting me at every step.  I have given you fair play, as the huntsmen give fair play at starting to the animal they are about to run down.  Be warned against seeking a false hope in the belief that my faculties are shaken, and that my resolves are visionary—­false, because such a hope is only despair in disguise.

“I have done.  The time is not far distant when my words will become deeds.  They cure fast in a public hospital:  we shall meet soon!

“ROBERT MANNION.”

“We shall meet soon!”

How?  Where?  I looked back at the last page of writing.  But my attention wandered strangely; I confused one paragraph with another; the longer I read, the less I was able to grasp the meaning, not of sentences merely, but even of the simplest words.

From the first lines to the last, the letter had produced no distinct impressions on my mind.  So utterly was I worn out by the previous events of the day, that even those earlier portions of Mannion’s confession, which revealed the connection between my father and his, and the terrible manner of their separation, hardly roused me to more than a momentary astonishment.  I just called to remembrance that I had never heard the subject mentioned at home, except once or twice