The paltry means by which the fraud had been effected, the magnitude and daring of the crime that it represented, the horror of the consequences involved in its discovery, overwhelmed me. Who could wonder now at the brute-restlessness of the wretch’s life⁠—at his desperate alternations between abject duplicity and reckless violence⁠—at the madness of guilty distrust which had made him imprison Anne Catherick in the asylum, and had given him over to the vile conspiracy against his wife, on the bare suspicion that the one and the other knew his terrible secret? The disclosure of that secret might, in past years, have hanged him⁠—might now transport him for life. The disclosure of that secret, even if the sufferers by his deception spared him the penalties of the law, would deprive him at one blow of the name, the rank, the estate, the whole social existence that he had usurped. This was the Secret, and it was mine! A word from me, and house, lands, baronetcy, were gone from him forever⁠—a word from me, and he was driven out into the world, a nameless, penniless, friendless outcast! The man’s whole future hung on my lips⁠—and he knew it by this time as certainly as I did!