Lieberg shut his teeth hard, and clenched his hand with a frowning brow; but he made no reply, and having dressed himself as far as was necessary, issued forth and proceeded to the room of Mr. Carr. That gentleman was coming out, with nothing but his stockings, breeches, and a grey dressing gown on; and grasping Lieberg's arm, he dragged him on towards the drawing-room, saying, "They have robbed me--they have plundered me--they have ruined me, sir!" Now there was nothing on earth that excited Lieberg's scorn and hatred so much as to see a human being give way to passion or emotion, simply because he had great powers of concealing his own; and the agony of Mr. Carr, on account of his loss, only served to curl his companion's lip with a contemptuous smile, and render all his movements, as if for the contrast's sake, as cool, as self-possessed as possible. While the old man, then, walked about the room in a state of half-frenzied agitation, Lieberg calmly approached the table, and after looking at him for a moment, with a cold, sneering, gaze, he opened quietly the leaves of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and began to turn over the engravings. "Do you know, Mr. Carr," he said, in the tone of a connoisseur, "I think they have made a very great mistake in representing Apollyon as so fearfully ugly. Surely, if that good gentleman, who tempts us all, be so frightful as he is here put down, we sinners must be men of good stomachs to run after his sweet things so greedily." Mr. Carr thought him perfectly insane; but Lieberg went on in the same spirit--"He should be rendered very beautiful and attractive, powerful certainly, and well armed, but still very charming; for we all of us paint our own particular fiend as a pleasant, sweet personage. Now you, for instance, never represent to yourself Mammon with horns and a tail, and all this paraphernalia of episodical horrors, fangs, and hoofs, and claws, and all that sort of a thing. I dare say, in your eyes, he is a sweet little cherub, with a purse in his hand, as I paint Asteroth to myself as a beautiful woman." The miser gazed at him as if he had suddenly found himself in the presence of a furious madman, and he exclaimed vehemently, in the first excitement of passion, "Why I believe that you are Satan himself! Is it not enough to drive me mad, to have lost seven thousand pounds in one night, without having a stranger insulting me in my own drawing-room, talking of Asteroth, and Mammon, and Apollyon, and all the follies that ever were concocted in the brain of that half-drunken idiot, John Bunyan?--Was it you that robbed me?--How should I know that it was not?--I never saw you before--you may have had a hand in it for aught I know!" "It is very probable," answered Lieberg, "especially as there has been another robbery committed in your house that you are not aware of, and that to a large amount."