"Were I in your place, I would keep my discovery a profound secret for some time to come. I would let her for a little while taste all the pleasures that wealth can confer. I would let her go on till a life of ease and self-indulgence should have become as it were a second nature to her I would let her live on in blissful ignorance, of the thunderbolt you have in store for her till she has learned to love--perhaps even till she is engaged to be married." "Eleanor married to another! I never thought of that," said Kelvin, under his breath. "Then, when you think the comedy has lasted long enough, you shall go to her some day when she is surrounded by her fine friends--on her wedding morning itself, if it so please you--and, touching her on the shoulder, you shall say to her, 'Eleanor Lloyd, you are a beggar!' Her fall from wealth to poverty will then seem infinitely greater than it would do now, and yours will be a revenge worthy of the name." "A devilish scheme, Olive, and one which only an Italian--or a woman--would have thought of!" "You flatter me," said Olive, with a little lifting of the shoulders, and the ghost of a smile playing round her thin lips. To say that Mr. Kelvin was thoroughly startled, is to say no more than the truth. Olive was right. There would be a refinement--a subtlety--about such a scheme which his own scheme altogether lacked. But, would it not be a mean and dastardly advantage to take of an innocent girl like Eleanor Lloyd? He got up from his chair and crossed to the window, and then walked slowly back again and sat down without a word. He was a man whom circumstances had never before tempted to step out of the beaten track of morality. The orthodox path had for him been paved with golden guineas. So far as he had seen, it was only reprobates who went astray, or were foolish enough to do anything which the general opinion of society condemned; simpletons, in fact, who could not understand that to do right--in a worldly point of view--was a far better paying game than to do its opposite. But Olive's words had found the weak place in his armour. His judgment did not fail him so utterly as to mislead him with regard to the meanness of what he meditated, but his own wishes and desires in the matter threw a sort of lime-light glamour over it, which made it seem something altogether different from what it really was. "I'll do it, Olive," he said at last. "Yes; for good or for evil, I'll do it! I'll crush her proud spirit to the dust. I will humiliate her as she humiliated me. She shall suffer as I suffered. I will repay scorn with scorn: insult with insult. At the moment of her greatest triumph I will strip her of love, of wealth, of friendship; and show her to the world for what she really is--a pauper and an outcast!" "Bravely spoken, Matthew! Don't let her soft looks or winning ways melt you from your purpose," said Olive, as she pushed back her chair. "And now I will go upstairs to my aunt."