Aaron’s look is hard as granite. There is a moment of silence. “Kill him!” he says at last, as though repeating a remark of his companion; “kill him! Yes; that, too, must come! But it must not come too soon for my perfect vengeance! First I shall uproot him politically; every hope he has shall die! I shall thrust him from his high places! When he lies prone, broken, powerless!--when he is spat upon by those in whose one-time downcast, servile presence he strutted lord paramount!--when his past is scoffed at, his future swallowed up!--when his word is laughed at and his fame become a farce!--then, when every fang of defeat pierces and poisons him, then I say should be the hour to talk of killing! That hour is not yet. I am a revengeful man, Van Ness--I am an artist of revenge! Believing as I do that with the going of the breath, all goes!--that for the Man there is no hereafter as there has been no past!--I must garner my vengeance on earth or forever lose it. So I take pains with my vengeance; and having, as I tell you, a genius for it, my vengeful pains shall find their dark and full-blown harvest. Hamilton, for whom my whole heart flows away in hate!--I shall build for him a pyramid of misery while he lives; and I shall cap that pyramid with his death--his grave! I can see, as one who looks down a lane, what lies before. I shall take from him every scrap of that power which is his soul’s food--strip him of each least fragment of position! When he has nothing left but life, I’ll wrest that from him. Long years after he is gone I’ll walk this earth; and I shall find a joy in his absence, and the thought that by my hand and my will he was made to go, beyond what the friendship of man or the favor of woman could bring me. Kill him! There is a grist in the hopper of my purposes, friend, and the mill stones of my plans are grinding!” Aaron does not look at Van Ness as he thus brings the secrets of his soul to the light of day, but wears the manner of one preoccupied and in the spell of self. Van Ness shudders as he listens; and, while the slow words follow one another in hateful swart procession, a chill creeps over him, as from the evil monstrous nearness of something elemental, abnormal, fearsome. A sweat breaks out on his face. Neither his wits nor his tongue can frame remark for either good or ill. The brooding Aaron seems not to notice, but falls into a black muse. CHAPTER XIV--THE TRIUMPH OF AARON IT is the era of bad feeling, and the breasts of men are reservoirs of poison. Jefferson and Adams, while known admitted rivals, deplore these wormwood conditions and strive against them. It is as though they strove against the tides; party lines were never more fiercely drawn. Some portrait of the hour may be found in the following: