Certain debts of his contracted at play I paid privately to surprise him--his gratitude was extreme.

I humored him in many of his small extravagances--I played with his follies as an angler plays the fish at the end of his line, and I succeeded in winning his confidence.

Not that I ever could surprise him into a confession of his guilty amour--but he kept me well informed as to what he was pleased to call "the progress of his attachment," and supplied me with many small details which, while they fired my blood and brain to wrath, steadied me more surely in my plan of vengeance.

Little did he dream in whom he was trusting!--little did he know into whose hands he was playing! Sometimes a kind of awful astonishment would come over me as I listened to his trivial talk, and heard him make plans for a future that was never to be.

He seemed so certain of his happiness--so absolutely sure that nothing could or would intervene to mar it.