Morton rose abruptly, went to the window, and stood looking out with a fixed gaze, wholly unconscious of what was before him. In a moment he turned again, and there was a wild and deadly light in his eyes. A thought had struck him, shooting an electric life through all his veins, and kindling him into a kind of fierce ecstasy. He would go to Vinal, charge him with his perfidy, challenge him, and put him to death. He paced the room in great disorder. A resistless power seemed to have seized upon him, sweeping him forward with the force of a torrent. He clinched his teeth and breathed deeply. The thought of action and of vengeance lighted up his perturbed and gloomy mind as the baleful glare of a conflagration lights up a stormy midnight. Suddenly he stopped, seated himself again, and remained for some minutes in violent mental conflict. "I thank God," he murmured at length, apostrophizing his enemy, "that you were not just now within my reach. You have ruined me for this life; you shall not ruin me for the next. Live, and work out your own destruction." He walked the room again, calmly enough, but in great dejection. "It may be," he thought, "that I am not his only victim. Perhaps the same art that snared me, has, by some infernal machination, entrapped her also. I believe it;--at least, I will try to believe it." He looked from the window upon the keen and busy crowds passing below in unbroken streams, to and from their places of business; and his mind tinged them with its own moody coloring. "You flight of human vultures! How many of you can show lives governed by any generous purpose or noble thought? Behind how many of those sharp and sallow features, furrowed with early wrinkles, lies the soul of a man? Desperate chasers after wealth, which, when you have won it, you have never been taught to use;--reckless pleasure hunters, beguiling others that your victims may beguile in turn, and both sink to perdition together. What you win with trickery, you throw away in vanity or debauch. The counting room or the broker's board by day;--brandy, billiards, and the rendezvous by night;--so you go,--a short, quick road;--driving to your doom with a high-pressure power of rapacity, vain glory, and lust. Man!--the thistledown of fortune, the shuttlecock of passion;--whirled on to destruction by the wildfire in his veins, unless by struggling and by prayer he can keep the narrow adamantine track laid down for his career!"