"You did well to come to me, Eleanor. I fancy you'll be interested to know what our young friend is about to encounter."
"Oh, I shall, I shall! Tell me, please." He smiled at her eagerness, so poorly subdued, recording in a mental footnote the viperish fury of a woman in her plight. Still, he thought she carried it off rather well. There had been need for his keenness to read her secret.
"I'll tell you, my girl, and I'm jolly glad to find some one who can enjoy it with me. What am I going to do with him?" He rose and paced the room for so long a time that she felt she could not bear it. She was about to speak when he abruptly halted and faced her with a petrifying burst of malignance. "What am I going to do with him?—wring him, wreck him, choke him, fling the fool back on his dung heap to rot!" She stared at him, panting; then, summoning all her ingenuity she smiled slowly above the sickening fear that had rushed over her. Teevan glowed. That smile of hers—he could detect something relentless in it—was a tribute to his prowess no less than a confirmation of his power to read her.
"I don't understand," she half whispered, still with that restrained fierceness that gave him joy.
"Of course you don't. Am I to be read as a primer? I'm subtler, I trust, than an earthquake, a cyclone, a deluge. You don't understand, but you shall." He paced the floor again with a foppish air of pride. "Ah, it has worked so beautifully. Really, I've regretted there was no one I could let in to enjoy a work of art with me. But you, I see, will have the taste to applaud it, Nell, now that your eyes are opened. Oh, the thing has gone ideally! Only applause was lacking."
"I don't understand, Randall." She could hardly manage the words. She was afraid her heart would beat them into some wild cry of impatience.
"You shall—you shall." He gazed meditatively at her. "Yes, and you'll have to know it all to understand perfectly, even my—my humiliation." He unlocked the door of a closet and brought out something she did not recognize until he had placed it across the arms of a chair and stepped back. It was the portrait of Ewing's mother. His face was contorted now in a most unpleasant sneer.
"There's the motif." He resumed his seat at the desk, facing the picture. The sneer had gone, and whatever dignity of soul was in him sounded in the next words.
"You can't know what that meant to me when I saw it, when I knew who had done it, when I thought of the creature who carried it about parading his own shame and hers—and mine!"
"I think I can understand that, Randall."