He sat down after he had brought forth a glass also, into which he poured a dram of spirit, and, supping it, continued his meditations, though still they were on the same subject, and still, therefore, full of bitterness. "Some men," he whispered to himself, "would stop here--would be content. Yet I will not stop--will never stop so long as Sophy's face rises before me every night--aye, and rises more plainly as I drink more; so long as there rises, too, the dank, reeking churchyard into which I stole at night--the night after my mother's burial. I will never stop," he continued, as he poured more spirits into the glass; "never. Only--what to do? how to go on? None would believe me now--none. None believed then that I was an innocent man and he the guilty one. None! My mother died with her heart broken, Sophy married the man whom she thought I had tried to rob. Curse him! I will never stop." Again he emptied the glass of spirits down his throat; yet, fiery as the drams were, they did not make him drunk. Instead, only the more resolute, the more hard, if the set look upon his face was any index to his mind. "He is ruined," he said to himself now. "Ruined. Still--that is not enough. Yet, how to do more? How! how! Short of murder I cannot slay him. There is no way. And I have sworn to slay him--his soul, if not his body. I have sworn to slay him, and there are no means. None. I shall never stamp on those grinning features; I can do nothing now." Sitting there, with on one side of him the glass--again empty, and soon again to be refilled--and on the other a guttering rushlight which imparted to his face a sickly, cadaverous appearance, he continued racking his brain as to how more calamity might be made to fall upon Beau Bufton, the man who, if his meditations might be taken as a clue to the past, had once brought terrible ruin to him. He wondered if this man Barry (who was, beyond all doubt, the future husband of the woman, the heiress, whom he and Anne Pottle had contrived to make their tool believe he was himself about to marry) could in any way be used as a means to the end; he pondered this, and then discarded that idea as worthless. "Sir Geoffrey Barry is a gentleman, an officer," he said. "Bufton is now an outcast. It is impossible. Impossible. Barry would not condescend to kick him."