“I cannot describe the feelings with which I realized my unhappy orphaned position, or the intensified horror with which I regarded this man, now justified in some measure in claiming my gratitude. He had devoted himself, while I lay insensible, to my affairs and my comfort, and might have expected some acknowledgment; but I looked upon him with an indescribable loathing, which, struggle as I would, I could make but a poor show of concealing. He was fully conscious of my attitude, of course, and, finding all efforts to conciliate me useless, brought matters very quickly to a crisis. One day he asked me abruptly what I proposed doing for a living, if I persisted in my refusal to join my fortunes with his. I stared at him in amazement; when he informed me, with the utmost sang-froid, that, by a lately executed will, my father had left him all his small fortune (including the material for the book) in trust for me, provided that I married him within a year of the testator’s death, and to him solely, in the event of my rejecting that condition. Furthermore he acquainted me with the facts that a considerable undischarged debt lay to my discredit at the hospice, that, so far as he knew, I was entirely without means, and that if he came forward to assist me, it must be on the express stipulation that I would give myself to him in pledge for that accommodation, when he would hope to convince me in time of the wisdom and policy of my subscribing to the terms of the will. “Mr Balm, I seemed to see in a flash the whole black depravity of the man. More, I remembered then that he had been on the hill with my father on the day of the fatal accident, and, in a fit of ungovernable passion and horror, I denounced him to his face. I accused him of having coerced my father into making the will, and then, in order to secure the permanency of its provisions, of tempting my unhappy parent to his destruction.