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
open or written avowal of the motives on which he had been all along
acting. In fact, at this time he was foiled by the agent in whom he
confided; but much more he had been confounded upon another point--the
prodigious interest manifested by the public. Thus it seems--that,
whilst he meditated only a snare for my poor Agnes, he had prepared one
for himself; and finally, to evade the suspicions which began to arise
powerfully as to his true motives, and thus to stave off his own ruin,
had found himself in a manner obliged to go forward and consummate the
ruin of another.

* * * * *

The state of Agnes, as to health and bodily strength, was now becoming
such that I was forcibly warned--whatsoever I meditated doing, to do
quickly. There was this urgent reason for alarm: once conveyed into
that region of the prison in which sentences like hers were executed,
it became hopeless that I could communicate with her again. All
intercourse whatsoever, and with whomsoever, was then placed under the
most rigorous interdict; and the alarming circumstance was, that this