But Morton stood without taking his proffered hand. The smile remained frozen on Vinal's face, and cold drops of doubt and fear began to gather on his forehead. "There is another friend of yours in the passage," said Morton.--"Come in, Speyer." Speyer entered, bowing with his usual composure. Vinal sank back in his chair, collapsing like a man withered with a palsy stroke. "Vinal," said Morton, after a silence of some moments, "you have a cool way of receiving your acquaintances." He made no answer, but still sat, or rather crouched, in the depths of his easy chair, where the thick bounding of his heart almost choked him. Morton stood for some time longer, looking at him. He had not reached such a point of Christian forgiveness as not to find pleasure in his enemy's tortures, and he saw that his silence tortured him more than words. "Vinal," he said at length, "I used to know you in college for a liar and a coward; and since then you have grown well in both ways. You have hatched into a full-fledged villain; and now that I have found you out, you crouch like a whipped cur." No answer was returned, and Morton's anger began to yield to a different feeling. If he could have seen the condition of Vinal's mind and body, he might, between pity and contempt, have spared him. "I came to upbraid you with your knaveries; but I find you hardly worth the trouble. Do you see this letter? It is the same that you wrote to this man at Marseilles, instructing him to forge a story that I was dead, and that he had seen my gravestone, with my mother's family device upon it. Will you dare deny that you wrote it? You will not! I thought as much. I have unravelled you from first to last. Five years ago, you bribed Speyer, here, to compromise me with the Austrian police. Pretending to be my friend, you gave me letters which betrayed me into a prison, where you hoped that I would end my days; and, next, you contrived this trickery to prove me dead. Is there any name in the English tongue too vile to mark you?" Vinal sat as if stricken dumb. "I know your reputation," pursued Morton. "You are in high feather here. You pass for a man of virtue, integrity, and honor. You make speeches at public meetings; Fourth of July orations; Phi Beta orations; charity harangues--any thing that smacks of philanthropy and goodness; any thing that will varnish you in the public eye. Why am I not bound to lay bare this whitewashed lie? What withholds me from grinding you like a scorpion under my boot-heel, or flinging you on the pavement to be stared at like a scotched viper? A word from me, and you are ruined. You need not fear it. Stay, and enjoy your honors as you can; but my foot shall be on your neck. This letter of yours is the spell by which I will rule you, body and soul." Here he paused again; but Vinal's tongue was powerless.