The fine edifice of vengeance he had been so skilfully erecting had toppled about his ears in obscene ruin, and he was a man not only broken, but dishonoured.

Let him proclaim the truth now and none would believe it.

Sylvia Armytage's mad and inexplicable self-accusation was a final bar to that.

Men of honour would scorn him, his friends would turn from him in disgust, and Wellington, that great soldier whom he worshipped, and whose esteem he valued above all possessions, would be the first to cast him out.

He would appear as a vulgar murderer who, having failed by falsehood to fasten the guilt upon an innocent man, sought now by falsehood still more damnable, at the cost of his wife's honour, to offer some mitigation of his unspeakable offence.
Conceive this terrible position in which his justifiable jealousy--his naturally vindictive rage--had so irretrievably ensnared him.