protesting against so poor a tipple as he took
more brandy for himself.

She watched him narrowly as he prepared his drink. The decanter was so
low that she thought he must be feeling what he had taken, and she
wondered if it might not have softened him, released some generosity in
his poor soul.

"You must have suffered, Randall, in all this. But won't it hurt you
still more, doing what you mean to do--when you make _him_ suffer?"

"His suffering!" He waved a deprecating hand. "What can he suffer
compared to me? Disgust I've suffered, yes, and mortification. He could
feel nothing approaching that if I flayed him here. Why, Nell, I pulled
a rose from its bush this morning in Neville's garden, and crushed a
worm crawling on its stem. A poor, tiny green thing, yet it had lived,
and had its successes and failures after a fashion. But you can't
imagine its actual suffering in death to equal my own mere disgust at
crushing it."

The brandy had not softened him, she thought. Could it have made him
cautious?

"Have you never suspected, Randall, that there may be a sleeping fighter
in him?" There was a glitter in her tormented eyes, a sudden fierce wish
to behold battle between this puny insulter and Ewing aroused to his
might.

"Bah! a fighter!" He snapped contemptuous fingers. "There's the look in
his eye sometimes, but I've disarmed him. He _can't_ fight me, his
benefactor, his best friend. Never fear; he'll wilt, wither, shrivel up.
Oh, trust me for that. And suppose the impossible, suppose the worm
turns in some fit of wormish desperation. I've the _coup_, have I not?
You know what his mother is to him, a damned romantic memory of pure
womanhood and all that rot. Suppose him capable of so much as an
eye-flash of defiance. Why, then, my child, he'll know who--he'll know
_what_--his mother was; and he'll know my right to describe her. He'll
know what _he_ is. And the words won't puzzle him: he'll need no
lexicon--crisp, Anglo-Saxon words. Do you think that will leave any
fight in him--her shame and his? By Gad! Nell, it's too good to keep
from him. He shall have it anyway, though I'd meant to keep it back for
my own sake. But that shall be the clincher. Before her face there I'll
tell him what she was."

"Not that, Randall, surely not that!" Her veil of calmness had flown on
the wind of his hate. She knew she must reveal herself. Her words had
been so near a cry that he turned on her in amazement.

"Listen, Randal