I must also confess to a certain satisfaction in feeling that I had power over my enemy--power of making him feel my power--power of vindicating my character against him as well, seeing one who could thus abstain from asserting his own rights could hardly have been one to invade the rights of another; but the enjoyment of this consciousness appeared to depend on my silence. If I broke that, the strength would depart from me; but while I held my peace, I held my foe in an invisible mesh. I half deluded myself into fancying that, while I kept my power over him unexercised, I retained a sort of pledge for his conduct to Mary, of which I was more than doubtful; for a man with such antecedents as his, a man who had been capable of behaving as he had behaved to Charley, was less than likely to be true to his wife: he was less than likely to treat the sister as a lady, who to the brother had been a traitorous seducer. I have now to confess a fault as well as an imprudence--punished, I believe, in the results. The behaviour of Mr. Coningham still rankled a little in my bosom. From Geoffrey I had never looked for anything but evil; of Mr Coningham I had expected differently, and I began to meditate the revenge of holding him up to himself: I would punish him in a manner which, with his confidence in his business faculty, he must feel: I would simply show him how the precipitation of selfish disappointment had led him astray, and frustrated his designs. For if he had given even a decent attention to the matter, he would have found in the forgery itself hints sufficient to suggest the desirableness of further investigation. I had not, however, concluded upon anything, when one day I accidentally met him, and we had a little talk about business, for he continued to look after the rent of my field. He informed me that Sir Geoffrey Brotherton had been doing all he could to get even temporary possession of the park, as we called it; and, although I said nothing of it to Mr Coningham, my suspicion is that, had he succeeded, he would, at the risk of a law-suit, in which he would certainly have been cast, have ploughed it up. He told me, also, that Clara was in poor health; she who had looked as if no blight could ever touch her had broken down utterly. The shadow of her sorrow was plain enough on the face of her father, and his confident manner had a little yielded, although he was the old man still. His father had died a little before Sir Giles. The new baronet had not offered him the succession. I asked him to go with me yet once more to Umberden Church--for I wanted to show him something he had over-looked in the register--not, I said, that it would be of the slightest furtherance to his former hopes. He agreed at once, already a little ashamed, perhaps, of the way in which he had abandoned me. Before we parted we made an appointment to meet at the church.