In the whirl of his thoughts there was fierce torture, which he strove unavailingly to subdue: the impossibility of evading the discovery which must soon be made; the additional crime by which alone he could hope to escape suspicion; a sudden unborn fear that Harriet would fail him in this need--a fear which simply signified despair--a horrid, baffled, furious helplessness; and a tormenting, overmastering passion for a woman who treated him with all the calculated cruelty of coquetry--these were the conflicting elements which strove in the man's dark, bad heart, and rent it between them, as he stood idly by the window where his wife had been accustomed to sit and undergo her own form of torture. By degrees one fear got the mastery over the others, and Routh faced it boldly. It was the fear of Harriet. Suppose the worst, came to the worst, he thought, and there was no other way of escape, would she suffer him to sacrifice George? _He_ could do it; the desperate resource which he had never hinted to her was within his reach. They had talked over all possibilities in the beginning, and had agreed upon a plan and direction of flight in certain contingencies, but he had always entertained the idea of denouncing George, and now, by the aid of Jim Swain, he saw his way to doing so easily and successfully. Harriet had always been a difficulty, and now the obstacle assumed portentous proportions. He had no longer his old power over her. He knew that; she made him feel this in many ways; and now he had aroused her jealousy. He felt instinctively that such an awakening was full of terrible danger; of blind, undiscoverable peril. He did not indeed know by experience what Harriet's jealousy might be, but he knew what her love was, and the ungrateful villain trembled in his inmost soul as he remembered its strength, its fearlessness, its devotion, its passion, and its unscrupulousness, and thought of the possibility of all these being arrayed against him. Not one touch of pity for her, not one thought of the agony of such love betrayed and slighted, of her utter loneliness, of her complete abandonment of all her life to him, intruded upon the tumult of his angry mind. He could have cursed the love which had so served him, now that it threatened opposition to his schemes of passion and of crime. He did curse it, and her, deeply, bitterly, as one shade after another of fierce evil expression crossed his face.