But he had advanced no farther than this.

How he was to abandon the woman who had trusted him, without seeing his own dastardly conduct dragged into the light of day, was more than he yet knew.

A vague idea of at once pacifying and deluding Anne, by a marriage which should be no marriage at all, had crossed his mind on the journey.

He had asked himself whether a trap of that sort might not be easily set in a country notorious for the looseness of its marriage laws--if a man only knew how?
And he had thought it likely that his well-informed brother, who lived in Scotland, might be tricked into innocently telling him what he wanted to know.

He had turned the conversation to the subject of Scotch marriages in general by way of trying the experiment.