the recollection of all parties, until it was now brought back in this
memorable way. The name of my wife was embroidered within, upon the
lining, and it thus became a serviceable link to the hellish cabal
against her. Upon reviewing the circumstances from first to last, upon
recalling the manner of the girl at the time when the muff was missed,
and upon combining the whole with her recent deception, by which she
had misled her poor mistress into visiting this shop, Agnes began to
see the entire truth as to this servant's wicked collusion with
Barratt, though, perhaps, it might be too much to suppose her aware of
the unhappy result to which her collusion tended. All this she saw at a
glance when it was too late, for her first examination was over. This
girl, I must add, had left our house during my illness, and she had
afterwards a melancholy end.

One thing surprised me in all this. Barratt's purpose must manifestly
have been to create merely a terror in my poor wife's mind, and to stop
short of any legal consequences, in order to profit of that panic and
confusion for extorting compliances with his hideous pretensions. It
perplexed me, therefore, that he did not appear to have pursued this
manifestly his primary purpose, the other being merely a mask to
conceal his true ends, and also (as he fancied) a means for effecting
them. In this, however, I had soon occasion to find that I was
deceived. He had, but without the knowledge of Agnes, taken such steps
as were then open to him, for making overtures to her with regard to
the terms upon which he would agree to defeat the charge against her by
failing to appear. But the law had travelled too fast for him, and too
determinately; so that, by the time he supposed terror to have operated
sufficiently in favor of his views, it had already become unsafe to
venture upon such explicit proposals as he would otherwise have tried.
His own safety was now at stake, and would have been compromised by any