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friend who procured you privileges with Margaret which her father would not grant at your own request. This, at the outset, secured me from suspicion on your part; and I had only to leave it to your infatuation to do the rest. With you my course was easy⁠—with her it was beset by difficulties; but I overcame them. Your fatal consent to wait through a year of probation, furnished me with weapons against you, which I employed to the most unscrupulous purpose. I can picture to myself what would be your indignation and your horror, if I fully described the use which I made of the position in which your compliance with her father’s conditions placed you towards Margaret. I spare you this avowal⁠—it would be useless now. Consider me what you please; denounce my conduct in any terms you like: my justification will always be the same. I was the injured man, you were the aggressor; I was righting myself by getting back a possession of which you had robbed me, and any means were sanctified by such an end as that. > > But my success, so far, was of little avail, in itself; against the all-powerful counterattraction which you possessed. Contemptible, or not, you still had this superiority over me⁠—you could make a fine lady of her. From that fact sprang the ambition which all my influence, dating as it did from her childhood, could not destroy. There, was fastened the mainspring which regulated her selfish devotion to you, and which it was next to impossible to snap asunder. I never made the attempt. > > The scheme which I proposed to her, when she was fully prepared to hear it, and to conceal that she had heard