"I've let you ramble on in your maudlin talk, Woodman, because it amused me. For years I've waited for your coming. Your unexpected advent is the sweetest triumph of this festival night. The offer I made you was at the suggestion of my wife. I did it solely to please her. I think you will take my word for it to-night." He paused and a sinister smile played about his mouth. "The last time I saw you I promised myself that I'd make you come to me the next time, and when you did, that you'd come on your hands and knees."
The doctor's big fists suddenly closed and Bivens took a step back toward his desk when his slender hand gripped and fumbled a heavy cut glass ink stand. The older observed his trembling hand with a smile of contempt.
"And I swore," Bivens went on in a voice quivering with unrestrained passion, "that when you looked up into my face grovelling and whining for mercy as you have to-night, I'd call my servants and order them to kick you down my door step."
He loosed his hold on the ink stand and leaned across the massive flat-top desk to touch an electric button.
The doctor's fist suddenly gripped the outstretched hand and his eyes glared into the face of the financier with the dangerous look of a madman.
"You had better not ring that bell, yet," he said, with forced quiet in his tones.
Bivens hesitated and his muscles relaxed in the grip on his wrist.
"You wish to prolong the agony for another moral discussion?" the financier asked with a sneer. "All right, if you enjoy it."
"Just long enough to say one thing to you, Bivens. There's a limit beyond which you and your kind had better not press the men you have wronged. You have made a brave show of your power to-night. Well, you are mistaken if you believe you can longer awe the imagination of the world with its tinsel. You have begun to stir deeper thoughts. Look to your skin. I've always said this is God's world, and it must come out right in the end. I've begun to think to-night there's something wrong. God can't look down and see what's going on here—the God I've tried to serve and worship, whose praise I have sung beneath the stars on fields of battle with the blood streaming from wounds I got fighting for what I believed to be right. If the devil rules the universe, and dog-eat-dog is the law, there'll be a big hand feeling for your throat, feeling blindly in the dark, perhaps, but it will get there! When I look into your brazen face to-night, and hear the strains of that music, there's something inside of me that wants to kill."
"But you won't, Woodman!" Bivens interrupted with a sneer.