"But what will you do to-night--what can you say?" "Everything I've laid a train for saying, this year past. Tell him how I despise him for his empty pretensions, his constant, wretched failures. Show him to himself as a conceited dawdler and a cheat who has lived on my bounty--oh, I saw to that--a cheat who has defrauded me of time and money and faith in man. Never fear but I'll know the things to say. I've told them to _her_ often enough." He thrust viciously at the portrait. "And you'll hear it all, my Lady Disdain, with your face to the wall to hide its belated blushes." Again she tried to speak but her lips were dry. At last she achieved a few rather husky words. "Randall, if you please, might I have a glass of something--water, I'd like." "To be sure, my child. You're certain you won't join me in a brandy and soda? No? I'll get you something below." She clutched at the moment to quiet, if she could, that tumult of heart and brain. Her mind dwelt chiefly on Ewing's dejection as she had left him the day before. Teevan came back, bearing a carafe and a bottle of soda water. She drank a glass of the water greedily, and murmured her thanks as he gave her more. It refreshed her and she seemed to feel a renewal of strength. Her fever was heating her brain to wild activity. She felt a crazy desire to cool her head, to lean it against snow or cold metal. She thought fleetingly of cold things she had touched, of marble, icicles, a brass rail with frost on it. She was goading her mind for a way to reach Teevan. She drank the second glass of water, and again he refilled it, 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.