He paused, and extending his right forefinger pointed at the bust of himself and exclaimed:
"That man--there--that you've made in my image--line for line--torture for torture, must go on living in the hell which he has prepared with his own perverted mind. He can never get back. It is too late--too late--too late!"
His voice rose to a kind of restrained fury. The room shook with its strong vibrations.
Then he turned to Barbara, smiled, all of a sudden, gayly, almost genuinely, and said in a voice of humble gallantry:
"But I've done you a good turn. If you never proved it before, you're proving these days that you are a heaven-born genius."
A harder-headed girl than Barbara must have been pleased and beguiled. She blushed, and laughed. "I've only one thing to wish for," she said.
"What is that?"
"I wish," she said, "that you were the greatest art critic in the world."
He leaned forward, and in a confidential whisper: "A secret," said he, "between us two. I am."
Then they both laughed, and the beggar, not without reluctance, climbed down from the platform. Swift and easy as were his motions, he appeared to terrible disadvantage, and he knew it. So did Barbara, who a moment before had been on the point of really liking him. She steeled herself against the sudden disgust which she could not help feeling, and smiled at him in a steady, friendly way.