Mr. Elver drank and wiped his eyes. “But I’ll make them smart for it one day,” he said, banging the table with his fist. The violent self-pity of a moment ago transformed itself into an equally violent anger. “I’ll make them all pay for what I suffered. When I’m rich.” “That’s the spirit,” said Mr. Cardan encouragingly. “Thirteen years of it I had,” Mr. Elver went on. “And two and a half years during the war, dressed in uniform and filling up forms in a wooden hut at Leeds; but that was better than touting for advertisements. Thirteen years. Penal servitude with torture. But I’ll pay them, I’ll pay them.” He banged the table again. “Still,” said Mr. Cardan, “you seem to have got out of it now all right. Living here in Italy is a sign of freedom; at least I hope so.” At these words Mr. Elver’s anger against “them” suddenly dropped. His face took on a mysterious and knowing expression. He smiled to himself what was meant to be a dark, secret and satanic smile, a smile that should be all but imperceptible to the acutest eye. But he found, in his tipsiness, that the smile was growing uncontrollably broader and broader; he wanted to grin, to laugh aloud. Not that what he was secretly thinking about was at all funny; it was not, at any rate when he was sober. But now the whole world seemed to swim in a bubbly sea of hilarity. Moreover, the muscles of his face, when he started to smile satanically, had all at once got out of hand and were insisting on expanding what should have been the expression of Lucifer’s darkest and most fearful thoughts into a bumpkin’s grin. Hastily Mr. Elver extinguished his face in his glass, in the hope of concealing from his guest that rebellious smile. He emerged again choking. Mr. Cardan had to pat him on the back. When it was all over, Mr. Elver reassumed his mysterious expression and nodded significantly. “Perhaps,” he said darkly, not so much in response to anything Mr. Cardan had said as on general principles, so to speak, and to indicate that the whole situation was in the last degree dubious, dark and contingent—contingent on a whole chain of further contingencies. Mr. Cardan’s curiosity was roused by the spectacle of this queer pantomime; he refilled his host’s glass. “Still,” he insisted, “if you hadn’t freed yourself, how would you be staying here—” in this horrible marsh, he had almost added; but he checked himself and said “in Italy” instead. The other shook his head. “I can’t tell you,” he said darkly, and again the satanic smile threatened to enlarge itself to imbecility. Mr. Cardan relapsed into silence, content to wait. From the expression on Mr. Elver’s face he could see that the effort of keeping a secret would be, for his host, intolerably great. The fruit must be left to ripen of itself. He said nothing and looked pensively into one of the dark corners of the tomb-like chamber as though occupied with his own thoughts.