, I feel that my soul yearns for his welfare. If
he have been criminal, that is owing to circumstances; the same qualities under
other circumstances would have been, or rather were sublimely beneficent.
    My reasonings were no doubt infinitely more favourable to Mr. Falkland than
those which human beings are accustomed to make in the case of such as they
style great criminals. This will not be wondered at when it is considered that I
had myself just been trampling on the established boundaries of obligation, and
therefore might well have a fellow feeling for other offenders. Add to which, I
had known Mr. Falkland from the first as a beneficent divinity. I had observed
at leisure and with a minuteness which could not deceive me the excellent
qualities of his heart, and I found him possessed of a mind beyond comparison
the most fertile and accomplished I had ever known.
    But, though the terrors which had impressed me were considerably alleviated,
my situation was notwithstanding sufficiently miserable. The ease and
light-heartedness of my youth were for ever gone. The voice of an irresistible
necessity had commanded me to sleep no more. I was tormented with a secret of
which I must never disburthen myself; and this consciousness was at my age a
source of perpetual melancholy. I had made myself a prisoner, in the most
intolerable sense of that term, for years, perhaps for the rest of my life.
Though my prudence and discretion should be invariable, I must remember that I
should have an overseer vigilant from conscious guilt, full of resentment at the
unjustifiable means by which I had extorted from him a confession, and whose
lightest caprice might at any time decide upon every thing that was dear to me.
The vigilance even of a public and systematical despotism is poor, compared with
a vigilance which is thus goaded by the most anxious passions of the soul.
Against this species of persecution I knew not how to invent a refuge. I dared
neither fly from the observation of Mr. Falkland, nor continue exposed to its
operation. I was at first indeed lulled in a certain degree to security upon the
verge of the precipice. But it was not long before I found a thousand
circumstances perpetually reminding me of my true situation. Those I am now to
relate are among the most memorable.
 

                                  Chapter VII

In no long time after the disclosure Mr. Falkland had made, Mr. Forester, his
elder brother by the mother's side, came to reside for a short period in our
family. This was a circumstance peculiarly adverse to my master's habits and
inclinations. He had broken off, as I