"I was ready to confess the truth, at every interview; then I put off the avowal, after my old fashion. I knew by that time that your father and yourself were lodging at the stationer's shop, and I formed a shrewd guess as to the rival I had in her affections. Finally, Sid, there came that night at New Cross, when she was carried away to Ashford. As I hope to be saved, I had no design against her then; in good faith, I was her escort to the railway station; it was only as we approached that station, that the ruse suggested itself--that the devil whispered in my ear his temptation. I knew the time of the mail-train; I had been by it _en route_ to Paris only a few weeks since; I led her along, unsuspecting of evil, to the other side of the railway station. She was with me in the carriage before I became conscious of the heinousness of the act I had committed. Even then I intended her no harm; I trusted all to circumstance; I was even prepared to marry her, rather than lose her; I was under a spell, Sidney!" "Yes--the spell of the devil." "When she discovered the truth, I found that I had secured her hate, rather than her love; at Ashford station she faced me like a tigress, and, full of the honest indignation that possessed her, held me up to the shame I deserved before a host of people--pointed me out as a coward and knave who had sought to cruelly deceive her. She claimed the protection of that--that terrible man in the shop there--he was at Ashford as you know--and I was glad to hide my head in the railway carriage, and be borne away from his withering contempt. That's the story. I will not tell you of the sorrow which I experienced for the harm that I had done her--of the shame that has remained with me since then--of the turn which she even gave to my character. Sidney, I would have made any reparation in my power--but I was baffled and degraded, and dared not look upon her any more." "That man I met at your house--he knew the story?" "He knew the beginning of it; and for Harriet Wesden's sake--and to redeem her character in the mind of a man who has not a high estimate of women--I told the end." Sidney sat and thought for a while. Then he pronounced his verdict. "All this assures me that you are easily led away--that it is only chance that has kept you from being wholly a bad man. You are weak, vacillating, and unprincipled--you are no Hinchford." "I have tried to do my best all my life, but somehow failed," said Maurice, ruefully; "impulse has led me wrong when my heart has meant right--candidly, cousin, I have been a fool more than once. But you cannot believe that I would do harm to any human being in cold blood?" "Possibly not. But what virtue is there in that?"