"It seemed a feasible one. In my own heart I did not expect to induce her to forsake her home; but I might; and the very doubt maddened me. And if I did not, yet for a few hours to have her near me, not in any spot that called her detested husband master, but in the wide, free scenes of nature, the ocean, parent of all liberty, spread at our feet; the way easy to escape, no eye, no ear, to watch and spy out the uncontrolled and genuine emotions of her heart, or no hand to check our progress if she consented to follow. In this plan Osborne, whom I had left at the miserable town of Ravenglass--and who, indeed, had been the man to find and point out to me the solitary hut, was necessary. My explanation and directions to him were few and peremptory: he was to appear with the calèche, he acting as postillion, at a certain spot; the moment he saw me arrive, as soon as I had placed the lady who was to be my companion in the carriage, he was to put spurs to his horses, and not by any cry of hers, nor command of mine, nor interference of strangers, to be induced to stop till he reached the hut: there she should be free; till then I would have her a prisoner even beyond my own control, lest her entreaties should cheat me out of my resolves. Osborne looked frightened at some portion of these orders, but I glossed over any inconsistency; my bribe was high, and he submitted. "At every step I took in this mad and guilty scheme, I became more resolved to carry it on. Here is my crime--here the tale of sin, I have to relate. The rest is disaster and endless remorse. What moved me to this height of insanity--what blinded me to the senseless as well as the unpardonable nature of my design, I cannot tell; except that, for years, I had lived in a dream, and waking in the real world, I refused to accommodate myself to its necessities, but resolved to bend its laws to my desires. I loved Alithea--I had loved her through years of absence; she was the wife of my reveries, my hopes, my heart. I could no more part with the thought of her as such, than with a consciousness of my own identity. To see her married and a mother, might be supposed capable of dissipating these fancies; far from it. Her presence, her beauty, the witchery of her eye, her heart-subduing voice, her sensibility, the perfection of her nature, which her inimitable loveliness only half expressed, but which reached my soul, through a sort of inner sense that acknowledged it with worship; all this added to my phrensy, and steeped me to the very lips in intoxication.