Aylmer gave a little low whistle of comprehension. Rattier nodded, still with a sort of grudging admiration of this English lord's talents and persistence. "Have you got it now?" went on Despard. "Do you see where they stand? Here, under the protections of the Bashaw, where Landon can never overbid them, they enjoy a security which they can obtain nowhere else outside America or Great Britain." Aylmer's eyes filled with a sudden shadow of loathing. "The scoundrel!" he cried. "The miscreant!" Despard nodded. "Quite so," he agreed. "The epithets any decent-minded man would apply to him. Unfortunately, he is without shame, reckless, and heedless of everything but his passionate desire to turn defeat into victory. He will stop at nothing to get even with those who have so far triumphed over him." "And the boy's mother lives here--with her sister?" said Aylmer. Despard did not reply for a moment. There was a queer pause and catch in his voice as if he sought uneasily for breath. "Miss Van Arlen is here, and the old man, Jacob Van Arlen, the grandfather." "And the mother?" asked Aylmer, with a note of surprise in his voice. "Lady Landon, or does one call her Mrs. Van Arlen?" "She is broken down in health," answered Despard, in a curiously wooden, expressionless accent. "She has been--recommended to try for at least six months the effects of an Alpine Sanatorium." The two listeners understood, or thought they understood, and muttered their sympathy in an almost inaudible chorus. "Insane?" they whispered. "Insane?" Despard smote his hand down upon the rotting wood. "No!" he cried fiercely. "Her brain is as sound as yours or mine, but her heart has been frozen. By God! Try to think, imagine, if you can, what hell a woman has lived in who was the wife of Landon!" His passion seemed to choke him. His eyes glowed, his chest heaved, he was another man from the one who had sat down smilingly to smoke a cigarette with them a few minutes before. And the passion of his wrath infected his hearers. Imagination painted pictures in their brains; they, too, breathed a little faster as they listened. The gust of Despard's passion passed and left him calm again. He gave a tiny shrug of the shoulders, which seemed to imply apology. He began to speak with ordinary unshaken accents.