he could not understand everything. What was this scheme of
vengeance which he was going to work upon her? It would be difficult to
analyse her feelings just then. The past and the present, the known and
the unknown, were so inter-woven that nothing seemed real.

"You wonder how a man can hate so?" he went on. "So do I now; but after
all, man is only an incipient devil when he gives way to his passions,
and I was only a reversion to type. This was the thought I had nursed;
through you I had been scorned, disgraced, through you I had been cast
into hell. I did not realise all that went before; I only remembered
those things which fed my hatred. And this is what I determined to do."

He hesitated a second, as though he feared to go on.

"It seems mean, it seems devilish," he said presently, "and it is what
it seems. I vowed that I would marry you with all the display of a great
wedding, and then when it was all over, when we were known to the world
as man and wife, I would tell you who I was, and I would tell you that
you were no wife at all, because I had married another woman elsewhere.
This also I would tell the world and leave you, disgraced, ruined, the
topic for scandal, the woman who had become the dupe, the plaything of
an adventurer, who was the husband of another wife, the father of
children in another part of the world."

Again he walked across the room and returned.

"Oh, I know it seems paltry, and it is paltry, the scheme of a
harlequin; all the same, I knew that it would make you feel what I had
felt. I knew your proud nature, and that you would never be able to hold
up your head again. I was sure that this would wound you a thousand
times more than poverty, or any other calamity which men fear. As for
Sprague, I had prepared for his fall. He should be ruined, disgraced, a
penniless vagrant.

"You despise me. Yes, yes, I know; but it was my plan of revenge, and
knowing you as I do, it was the most fiendish thing I could conceive of.
Not that I have a wife; no, great God, after knowing you, I could never
marry another, but this was my plan. I determined, too, that a history
of the man you had married, this Leicester whom you had scorned, should
be published in all the newspapers--a history which told of him as one
who for six years had lived in the foulest corruption. I fancied your
being discussed in every clubroom in London, in every ale-house in
England, that you, the proud Olive Castlemaine, who had