She saw him turn the color of his vest; saw him shrink, compress within himself, crumple, sag like a punctured football. She saw an ugly glint in his little, narrowed eyes; understood how she had put upon him the supreme affront of stripping him of his pretense and showing him to himself as he knew he was. She stood him before his own eyes, stark, horribly vivid; showed him secrets he concealed even from himself. Yet it was not Carmel who did this thing, but some uncontrollable force within her, some force fighting the battle of womanhood.... He got unsteadily to his feet and backed away from her mouthing. He stumbled, recovered, felt behind him for the door. “Damn you!” he cried shrilly. “Damn you!... You--you’ll suffer for this....” Then he was gone and she found herself kneeling with her face upon the seat of her chair, shaken by sobs. CHAPTER XI In the morning Carmel Lee had made up her mind. She did not know she had made up her mind, but it was none the less true. Her mind was of the sort which makes itself up upon slight provocation and then permits its owner to reason and argue and apply the pure light of reason to the problem in hand--a sort of _ex post facto_ deliberation. As may have been noted, the salient characteristic of this young woman was a certain impetuosity, a stubborn impulsiveness. Once her mind made itself up to a certain course of action, nothing short of an upheaval of nature could turn her from it. But, notwithstanding, she considered herself to be of a schooled deliberation. She believed she had impressed this deliberation upon herself, and was confident she reasoned out every matter of importance gravely and logically. Now, having determined just what she would do about the _cache_ of whisky she had discovered, she sat down before her desk to determine what it was best to do. So enraged, so shaken, had she been by her encounter with Abner Fownes the evening before, that it was necessary for her to take action against somebody or something. She could not demolish Fownes, and nobody else was handy, so she turned to the whisky and vented her anger and disgust upon that. While she sat before her desk pretending to herself that she was deliberating, Evan Bartholomew Pell came into the office, nodded curtly, and dropped in his chair. Carmel, of a sudden, seized paper and commenced to write. As she set down word after word, sentence after sentence, she became uneasily aware of some distracting influence. Upon looking up she identified this extraneous force as the eyes of Evan Pell. He was staring at her fixedly. “You forgot your spectacles this morning,” she said, sharply, to cover her embarrassment. “I have no spectacles,” he said, dryly. “What became of them?” “They--er--disappeared during the barbarous episode of the other day.” “You have no others?” “None.” “How can you work without them?”