The calm, unflinching courage that had been Joseph's only virtue was shattered, and his iron will that had unscrupulously held hitherto his very conscience in bondage was turned to water now that he stood face to face with death.
Eons of time it seemed to him were sped since the sword was wrenched from his hand, and still the stroke he awaited came not; still Crispin stood, sinister and silent before him, watching him with magnetic, fascinating eyes--as the snake watches the bird--eyes from which Joseph could not withdraw his own, and yet before which it seemed to him that he quaked and shrivelled.
The candles were burning low in their sconces, and the corners of that ample, gloomy hall were filled with mysterious shadows that formed a setting well attuned to the grim picture made by those two figures--the one towering stern and vengeful, the other crouching palsied and livid.
Beyond the table, and with the wounded Gregory--lying unconscious and bleeding--at his feet, stood Kenneth looking on in silence, in wonder and in some horror too.
To him also, as he watched, the seconds seemed minutes from the time when Crispin had disarmed his opponent until with a laugh--short and sudden as a stab--he dropped his sword and caught his victim by the throat.
However fierce the passion that had actuated Crispin, it had been held hitherto in strong subjection.

But now at last it suddenly welled up and mastered him, causing him to cast all restraint to the winds, to abandon reason, and to give way to the lust of rage that rendered ungovernable his mood.
Like a burst of flame from embers that have been smouldering was the upleaping of his madness, transfiguring his face and transforming his whole being.

A new, unconquerable strength possessed him; his pulses throbbed swiftly and madly with the quickened coursing of his blood, and his soul was filled with the cruel elation that attends a lust about to be indulged the elation of the beast about to rend its prey.
He was pervaded by the desire to wreak slowly and with his hands the destruction of his broken enemy.

To have passed his sword through him would have been too swiftly done; the man would have died, and Crispin would have known nothing of his sufferings.

But to take him thus by the throat; slowly to choke the life's breath out of him; to feel his desperate, writhing struggles; to be conscious of every agonized twitch of his sinews, to watch the purpling face, the swelling veins, the protruding eyes filled with the dumb horror of his agony; to hold him thus--each second becoming a distinct, appreciable division of time--and thus to take what payment he could for all the blighted years that lay behind him--this he felt would be something like revenge.
Meanwhile the shock of surprise at the unlooked-for movement had awakened again the man in Joseph.