njoy a work of art with me. But you, I see, will have
the taste to applaud it, Nell, now that your eyes are opened. Oh, the
thing has gone ideally! Only applause was lacking."

"I don't understand, Randall." She could hardly manage the words. She
was afraid her heart would beat them into some wild cry of impatience.

"You shall--you shall." He gazed meditatively at her. "Yes, and you'll
have to know it all to understand perfectly, even my--my humiliation."
He unlocked the door of a closet and brought out something she did not
recognize until he had placed it across the arms of a chair and stepped
back. It was the portrait of Ewing's mother. His face was contorted now
in a most unpleasant sneer.

"There's the _motif_." He resumed his seat at the desk, facing the
picture. The sneer had gone, and whatever dignity of soul was in him
sounded in the next words.

"You can't know what that meant to me when I saw it, when I knew who
had done it, when I thought of the creature who carried it about
parading his own shame and hers--and _mine_!"

"I think I can understand that, Randall."

"You can't, I say. No woman could. You can't begin to know the
humiliation, how it tore me, knowing this fellow walked the earth at
all, a nameless spawn, holding my shame over me--over _me_! threatening
every instant to cover me again with it. As if I'd not survived enough!
Good God! was I to go through it again, and know that this puling whelp
was the instrument--a thing to torture me, hold me up to ridicule, to
make men smile and titter and mock me in club corners? Wasn't _her_
insult enough? Must she breed obscene things to echo it?" He groaned and
turned away with a gesture of warding off. In the mist of her besetment
the woman found herself thinking that the fine little hands in this
gesture should have been lace-beruffled at the wrist. He was the figure
of stabbed vanity, the bleeding coxcomb. He flung an arm toward the
picture with bitter vehemence.

"Ah, my lady! my fine, loose lady, with your high talk and your low way!
I hope you've watched me with those painted eyes of yours. Did you think
I'd never strike back?"

"But now, Randall--_how_?" He replenished his glass and turned slowly
away from the picture.

"How, indeed? That's where you meet me at last. Not every one could have
carried it through, but it was simple for me. Difficult in a way, yes.
It's been hard to stomach the fool, with his conceit and his whining.
Oh, he fa