"Among the thousand schemes for retribution which had chased each other
across my mind, the death of my victim was only the ulterior object.
Death, indeed--the pang of one moment--appeared to me but very feeble
justice for the life of lingering and restless anguish to which his
treachery had condemned me; but my penance, my doom, I could have
forgiven: it was the fate of a more innocent and injured being which
irritated the sting and fed the venom of my revenge. That revenge no
ordinary punishment could appease. If fanaticism can only be satisfied by
the rack and the flames, you may readily conceive a like unappeasable
fury in a hatred so deadly, so concentrated, and so just as mine; and if
fanaticism persuades itself into a virtue, so also did my hatred.

"The scheme which I resolved upon was to attach Tyrrell more and more to
the gaming-table, to be present at his infatuation, to feast my eyes upon
the feverish intensity of his suspense; to reduce him, step by step, to
the lowest abyss of poverty; to glut my soul with the abjectness and
humiliation of his penury; to strip him of all aid, consolation,
sympathy, and friendship; to follow him, unseen, to his wretched and
squalid home; to mark the struggles of the craving nature with the
loathing pride; and, finally, to watch the frame wear, the eye sink, the
lip grow livid, and all the terrible and torturing progress of gnawing
want to utter starvation. Then, in that last state, but not before, I
might reveal myself; stand by the hopeless and succourless bed of death;
shriek out in the dizzy ear a name, which could treble the horrors of
remembrance; snatch from the struggling and agonizing conscience the last
plank, the last straw, to which, in its madness, it could cling, and
blacken the shadows of departing life, by opening to the shuddering sense
the threshold of an impatient and yawning hell.

"Hurried away by the unhallowed fever of these projects, I thought of