"I don't think it matters much," she said scornfully, "what becomes of you." "Matters?" he exclaimed. "If you are such a coward as this! Tell me what it is. What has happened? If it is not that some one has beaten you, I don't know what it is--unless you have been doing something wrong, and they have put you out of the University? Is it that?" "No!" he cried fretfully. "Worse, worse! And do you leave me! You can do nothing! No one can do anything!" She had her own troubles, and to-day was almost sinking under them. But this was not her way of bearing them. She shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. "Very well," she said, "I will go if I can do nothing." "Do?" he cried vehemently. "What can you do?" And then, in the act of turning from him, she stood; so startling was the change, so marvellous the transformation which she saw come over his face. "Do," he repeated, trembling violently, and speaking in a tone as much altered as his expression. He rose to his feet. "Do? Perhaps you--you can do something--still. Wait. Please wait a minute! I--I was not quite myself." He passed his hand across his brow. She did not know that behind his face of frightened stupor his mind was working cunningly, following up the idea that had occurred to him. She began to think him mad. But though she held him in distaste, she had no fear of him; and even when he closed the door with a cringing air, and a look that implored indulgence, she held her ground. "Only, you need not close the door," she said coldly. "There is no one in the house except my mother." "Messer Basterga?" "He has gone out. Is it of him," in sudden enlightenment, "that you are afraid?" He nodded sullenly. "Yes," he said; and then he paused, eyeing her in doubt if he could trust her. At last, "It is, but, if you dared do it, I know how I could draw his teeth! How I could"--with the cruel grin of the coward--"squeeze him! squeeze him!" and he went through the act with his nervous, shaking fingers. "I could hold him like that! I could hold him powerless as the dog that would bite and dare not!" She stared at him. "You?" she said; it was hard to say whether incredulity or scorn were written more plainly on her face. "You?" "I! I!" he replied, with the same gesture of holding something. "And I know how to put him in your power also!" "In my power!" "Ay." Her face grew hard as if she too held her enemy passive in her grip. Then her lip curled, and she laughed in scorn. "Ay! And what must I do to bring that about? Something, I suppose, you dare not, Louis?" "Something you can do more easily than I," he answered doggedly. "A small thing, too," he continued, clasping his hands in his eagerness and looking at her with imploring eyes. "A nothing, a mere nothing!" "And yet it will do so much?" "I swear it will." "Then," she retorted, eyeing him shrewdly, "if it is so easy to do why were you undone a minute ago? And puling like a child in arms?"