Morphew had had the best of him from the outset, had chosen the ground, forced the fighting, outgeneralled him in every skirmish, beaten him down at last to his knees, forced him to stomach quarter on conditions unspeakably humiliating. But better to bow to such abasement than forfeit every chance to clear his scutcheon or, failing, tear him down whose malevolence had been the first cause of its smirching, down from the strong place he had set up to be his refuge, and bury him deep in its ruins--though these bury not Morphew alone.
To compass an end so just, to avenge society as he revenged himself, was the one way Lanyard could conjecture to make amends for being as life had made him; to this he dedicated himself without any reservation whatever, renouncing every cherished prejudice against unfaith and double-dealing, holding no sacrifice whether of scruples or of life itself too heavy a price to pay for its accomplishment, refusing to know any depth of degradation to which he would not gladly descend with the promise that at the bottom he would find Morphew's throat defenseless.
Intuition gave one gleam of hope. Making no claim to the ability to read Morphew's mind, Lanyard assumed with confidence to assay his manner; and recreating this to his mental vision, as it had been manifest in last night's rencontre, estimated every facet of it false. Morphew only too possibly might have been sincere in all he had asserted concerning the recrudesence of the Lone Wolf in the flesh of Michael Lanyard; but his honest scorn, paraded for what he professed to consider disingenuous efforts to hide behind a claim of lost memory, had been in Lanyard's judgment sheerest sham, paste indignation donned for the occasion and, by that token, for some sly purpose. Morphew had taken too much humbling at Lanyard's hands to spare him without some compensating end in view, not conceivably a sordid one alone. If in actual need of money he was little likely to reject it unless Lanyard and none other, operating as a burglar, earned it for him. Power such as he pretended to, intelligently exerted, could hardly have failed to bring to heel that enterprising understudy of the Lone Wolf, who had been so busy all the while that Lanyard had been becalmed in the Bahamas, and bend him to Morphew's purposes as Morphew now proposed to bend Lanyard. So it seemed not unreasonable to assume that the use which Morphew had for Lanyard was another than he avowed, some end that Lanyard alone of all men could serve, therefore not an end of simple avarice--in short, nothing but the satisfaction of some all-absorbing private passion.