all his caution and success, had come to this.
It was strange, perhaps—if the probability or
the strangeness of anything in such a condition
of mind as his can be defined—that he seldom
thought of the dead man. No curiosity about
him had troubled the triumph of Routh's
schemes. He had met so many men in the
course of his life who were mere waifs and
strays in the world of pleasure and swindling,
who had no ties and no history; about whom
nobody cared; for whom, on their disappearance
from the haunts in which their presence had been
familiar, nobody inquired, that one more such
instance, however emphasised by his own sinister
connexion with him, made little impression on
Stewart Routh. Looking back now in the light
of this revelation, he could not discover that any
intimation had ever been afforded to, or had ever
been overlooked by him. The dead man had never
dropped a hint by which his identity might have
been discovered, nor had he, on the other hand,
ever betrayed the slightest wish or purpose of
concealment, which probably would have aroused
Routh's curiosity, and set his investigative
faculties to work. He had never speculated, even
at times when all his callousness and cynicism
did not avail to make him entirely oblivious of
the past, on the possibility of his learning
anything of the history of Philip Deane; he had
been content to accept it, as well as its termination,
as among the number of the wonderful
mysteries of this wonderful life, and had, so far
as in him lay, dismissed the matter from his
mind. Nothing that had ever happened in his
life before had given him such a shock as the
discovery he had made yesterday. The first
effect on him has been seen; the second,
ensuing on his conversation with his wife, was a
blind and desperate rage, of a sort to which he
had rarely yielded, and of whose danger he was
dimly conscious, even at its height. He was
like a man walking on a rope at a giddy
elevation, to whom the first faint symptoms of
vertigo were making themselves felt, who was
invaded by the death-bringing temptation to
look down and around him. The solemn and
emphatic warning of his wife had had its effect
upon his intellect, though he had hardened his
heart against it. It was wholly impossible that
her invariable judgment, perception, and
reasonableness—the qualities to which he had owed
so much in all their former life—could become
immediately valueless to a man of Routh's keenness;
he had not yet been turned into a fool by
his sudden passion for the beautiful American;
he still retained sufficient sense to wonder and
scoff at himself for having been made its victim
so readily; and he raged and rebelled against
the conviction that Harriet was right, but raged
and rebelled in vain.

In the whirl of his thoughts there was fierce
torture, which he strove unavailingly to subdue:
the impossibility of evading the discovery
which must soon be made; the additional
crime by which alone he could hope to escape
suspicion; a sudden unborn fear that Harriet
would fail him in this need—a fear which simply
signified despair—a horrid, baffled, furious
helplessness; and a tormenting, overmastering
passion for a woman who treated him with all
the calculated cruelty of coquetry—these were
the conflicting elements which strove in the
man's dark, bad heart, and rent it between them,
as he stood idly by the window where his wife
had been accustomed to sit and undergo her
own form of torture.

By degrees one fear got the mastery over the
others, and Routh faced it boldly. It was the
fear of Harriet. Suppose the worst came to
the worst, he thought, and there was no other
way of escape, would she suffer him to sacrifice
George? He could do it; the desperate
resource which he had never hinted to her was
within his reach. They had talked over all
possibilities in the beginning, and had agreed
upon a plan and direction of flight in certain
contingencies, but he had always entertained
the idea of denouncing George, and now, by
the aid of Jim Swain, he saw his way to doing
so easily and successfully. Harriet had always
been a difficulty, and now the obstacle assumed
portentous proportions. He had no longer his
old power over her. He knew that; she made
him feel this in many ways; and now he had
aroused her jealousy. He felt instinctively that
such an awakening was full of terrible danger;
of blind, undiscoverable peril. He did not
indeed know by experience what Harriet's jealousy
might be, but he knew what her love was, and
the ungrateful villain trembled in his inmost
soul as he remembered its strength, its fearlessness,
its devotion, its passion, and its
unscrupulousness, and thought of the possibility of all
these being arrayed against him. Not one touch
of pity for her, not one thought of the agony
of such love betrayed and slighted; of her utter
loneliness; of her complete abandonment of all
her life to him, intruded upon the tumult of his
mind. He could have cursed the love
which had so served him, now that it threatened
opposition to his schemes of passion and of
crime. He did curse it, and her, deeply, bitterly,
as one shade after another of fierce evil expression
crossed his face.

There was truth in what she had said, apart
from the maudlin sentiment from which not
even the strongest-minded woman, he supposed,
could wholly free herself—there was truth, a
stern, hard truth. He could indeed escape now,
taking with him just enough money to enable
them to live in decent comfort, or to make a
fresh start in a distant land, where only the
hard and honest industries throve and came to
good.  How he loathed the thought! How his
soul sickened at the tame, miserable prospect!
He would have loathed it always, even when
Harriet and he were friends and lovers;  and
now, when he feared her, when he was tired of
her, when he hated her, to contemplate such a
life now, was worse—well, not worse than death,
that is always the worst of all things to a bad
man, but something too bad to be thought of.
There was truth in what she had said, and the
knowledge of what was in his own thoughts, the