that fatal passion which has been the bane of thy happiness, and the
origin of my guilt.

"Avoiding as I scrupulously did the range of apartments inhabited by
the unfortunate Lady Greville, several years had passed since I had
beheld her; and sometimes when I had been bewildered in the reveries
of my own desolate heart, began to doubt her very existence. Yet this
unseen being who appeared to occupy no place in the scale of human
nature, this unconscious creature who now dwelt in my remembrance
like the unreal mockery of a dream, presented an insuperable
obstacle to my happiness. I saw my inheritance destined to be
wrenched from me

"'By an unlineal hand
No son of mine succeedingly,'

"and I felt myself doomed to resign every enjoyment and every hope for
the sake of one to whom the sacrifice availed nothing; one, too, who
had permitted me to fold her to my heart in the full confidence of
undivided affection, while her own was occupied by a passion whose
violence had deprived me of my child, and herself of intellect and
health.

"Such were the arguments by which I strove to blind myself to my
rising passion for another, and to smother the self-reproaches which
assailed me when I first conceived the fatal project of imposing upon
the world by the supposed death of my wife, and of seeking your hand
in marriage. How often did the better feelings of my nature recoil
from such an act of villainy--how often was my project abandoned, how
often resumed at the alternate bidding of passion and of virtue! I