marriage, which I proposed on the score of her uncle's implacable opposition. She steadily refused to yield to my passionate entreaties, and we parted with threats and upbraidings on my part, and contempt and defiance on hers. I was, of course, banished from Elmsley, and soon afterwards, for the purpose of saving myself from a threatened and disgraceful exposure, of a nature needless now to detail, I made a victim of that gentle and perfect Alice, who has almost as much reason as Ellen herself to curse the day on which I crossed her path. When I met the latter again, in London, some time after my marriage, I began to use that power which accident had given me. She had then found out that you were not, as she had imagined, aware of the event which had so fearfully blighted her peace. I then avowed myself the possessor of her secret; and alternately as a friend and as a foe--by devotion one while, and by threats another--I forced her to endure my presence,--to tolerate the expression of a passion, against which her heart revolted, but which she dared not peremptorily repel. I employed every art which cunning can devise to entangle and to bind her. In Mrs. Tracy's knowledge of her secret, and violent enmity against her, I held an engine which I skilfully turned to my purpose. I bound her by an oath never to reveal to you the history of Julia's death. She pronounced it; but even while she protested that she would never marry you, she declared to me, with the accents of intense passion, that though she had refused, she adored you, and that she would rather die at your feet, than live by my side. "After betraying her feelings in a moment of extraordinary agitation, she found herself almost involuntarily engaged to you; she wrote to me, and threw herself on my mercy. My feelings and my conduct, at that time, appear strange to myself. I was excluded from her uncle's house, and that intercourse with her, which was dearer to me than existence, was interrupted and thwarted in every way. By one effort, one great sacrifice, I regained her confidence, and re-established myself in that forfeited intimacy, at the same time that I bound her by fresh ties of fear and obligation. Perhaps I was also touched by her terrible situation: but be that as it may, I _allowed_ her to marry you; and by some concessions on my own part to her inveterate enemy, that old woman,--whose vindictive malice has ruined and undone us all,--I bought her silence, and once more shielded Ellen from disgrace and exposure.