I learned then from Desmarais that you had taken away her and the dying father, that you had placed them in a safe and honourable home. That man, so implicitly the creature of Montreuil, or rather of his own interest, with which Montreuil was identified, was easily induced to betray you also to me,--me whom he imagined, moreover, utterly the tool of the priest, and of whose torturing interest in this peculiar disclosure he was not at that time aware. I visited Isora in her new abode, and again and again she trembled beneath my rage. Then, for the second time, I attempted force. Ha! ha! Morton, I think I see you now!--I think I hear your muttered curse! Curse on! When you read this I shall be beyond your vengeance, beyond human power. And yet I think if I were mere clay; if I were the mere senseless heap of ashes that the grave covers; if I were not the thing that must live forever and forever, far away in unimagined worlds, where nought that has earth's life can come,--I should tremble beneath the sod as your foot pressed and your execration rang over it. A second time I attempted force; a second time I was repulsed by the same means,--by a woman's hand and a woman's dagger. But I knew that I had one hold over Isora from which, while she loved you, I could never be driven: I knew that by threatening your /life/, I could command her will and terrify her into compliance with my own. I made her reiterate her vow of concealment; and I discovered, by some words dropping from her fear, that she believed you already suspected me, and had been withheld by her entreaties from seeking me out. I questioned her more, and soon perceived that it was (as indeed I knew before) Gerald whom you suspected, not me; but I did not tell this to Isora. I suffered her to cherish a mistake profitable to my disguise; but I saw at once that it might betray me, if you ever met and conferred at length with Gerald upon this point, and I exacted from Isora a pledge that she would effectually and forever bind you not to breathe a single suspicion to him. When I had left the room, I returned once more to warn her against uniting herself with you. Wretch, selfish, accursed wretch that you were, why did you suffer her to transgress that warning?