The most powerful logic fails to supply one with any rules or data whereby to analyse the workings and application of motives. If we try within ourselves even to trace back a passing thought to its original cause and inception, we see how involved and erratic are its wanderings; and we are obliged to give up the hopeless quest from sheer inability to follow its course. No wonder, therefore, that human motives are difficult to fathom; and although writers of fiction have the presumptive right to lay bare the inward mechanism which directs and guides their various characters, and are permitted to exemplify--hanging their theories and arguments on certain lay-figures more or less natural--how such and such a train of thought, and such and such a motive leads on and up to such and such an end; still, it is a very deceptive argument at the best, and these deductions, however plausible, are often grievously in fault. Motives are inscrutable. The slightest bias or hitch one way or the other will produce an altogether different result. Let us just imagine "what might have been" in the lives of our heroes and heroines if some new little incident had cropped up, or some detail or phase been ever-so-little altered; and we cannot but agree, in the felicitous observation of one of our greatest authors and students of human nature, that the history of "great events that might have been" would far outweigh and be more deeply interesting than any history ever published of what _has_ happened! These remarks have been made with reference to the character of Clara Kingscott. She had been grossly deceived in the first instance by Markworth, brought about a good deal by herself, no doubt; but still she had been deceived and her reputation ruined. She then naturally hated the author of her misfortunes--for hate is closely akin to love--and yet with all her hate, the love that had first originated had not quite died out. She hated Markworth: she longed for revenge, she determined to be even with him; and yet at the same time, the greatest pang she could have suffered would have been to see him ruined, as she intended him to be by herself.