A suspicion of the truth I had entertained before; but this certainty that the man I was to be trepanned into personating was my benefactor, and that in the plot his own mother was engaged, filled me with as much horror, when I considered the necessity of complying under which I might have lain, as thankfulness when I reflected on the escape I had had. Nor did these two considerations, overwhelming as they may well appear, account for all the agitation I was experiencing. Mr. Martin, in speaking of Madame Monterey's origin, had mentioned Hertfordshire; and the name, bringing together two sets of facts hitherto so distant in my mind that I had never undertaken to connect them, had in a flash presented Smith and madame in their true colours. Why I had not before associated the Smith I now knew with that Templar Smith whom I darkly remembered as Jennie's accomplice in my early trouble; why I had not recognised in the woman's coarsely handsome features the charms that thirteen years before had fired my boy's blood and brought me to the foot of the gallows, is not more difficult to explain than why this one mention of Hertfordshire sufficed to raise the curtain; ay, and not only to raise it, but to set the whole drama so plainly before me that I could be no wiser had I followed every scene in madame's life, and, a witness of her shameful _débût_ under Smith's protection, her seduction of my lord and her period of splendour, had attended her in her final declension when, a discarded mistress, she saw no better alternative than a marriage with her former protector.
How greatly this identification of the two conspirators increased, as well as the loathing in which I held their schemes, as my relief upon the reflection that those schemes were now futile, I will not say. Suffice it that the knowledge that, but for Smith's arrest, I must have chosen between playing the basest part in the world and running a risk whereat I shuddered, filled me with thankfulness immeasurable, a thankfulness which I did not fail to pour out on my knees, and which was in no degree lessened by a shuddering consciousness that in that dilemma, had Providence not averted it, I might have--ay, should have--played the baser part!