Gerry Adams led his Assembly team down the stairs of Parliament Buildings, Stormont, into its great hall to translate into words for waiting journalists what was already clear on his face. Traditionally the Sinn Fein leader opens his press conferences in the Irish language. But before he switched from Irish into English, journalists didn't need an interpreter to explain to them that "fearg" meant anger.
Fury from Mr Adams, hard words, too. His implicit message was that Tony Blair's amendments were effectively recasting decommissioning as a precondition of the Belfast Agreement, rather than placing them as that paradoxical thing, a voluntary requirement.
If David Trimble and the British government really wanted guns they were going the wrong way about it, he said. And he said it very strongly. The "greatest blunder", added Martin McGuinness.
Gloomy faces all round from the Sinn Fein Assembly team.
There's a fairly workable Northern political formula that says that when republicans are down, unionists are up, and vice versa, but last night appeared to be proving the exception to the rule.
No beaming faces either from David Trimble's Assembly squad. Tony Blair, the Irish Government, the SDLP and numerous other politicians and commentators had pleaded with UUP members that The Way Forward document gave them an unbeatable hand on decommissioning.
But Mr Trimble and his colleagues conveyed the impression of morosely cautious people who, carrying four aces, would never make a wager for fear of confronting a straight flush. No risktakers here.
The UUP leader met his Assembly members at Stormont, and his ruling executive later at Glengall Street in central Belfast. The executive's position had not changed: that was translated as "no guns, no government".
John Taylor, ebullient even in the most trying circumstances, couldn't even bring himself to predict the chances of success. The highest he has gone in recent weeks was a "20 per cent" hope, but he had nothing to say yesterday.
There has been lots of talk recently that Mo Mowlam might be moving back "across the water" to a new portfolio. It wasn't top of the agenda yesterday, but one Stormont official did comment: "Lucky woman if she can get out". The island of Ireland, and Northern Ireland in particular, has had to try and keep its emotional balance as the political peace process rollercoastered from optimism to pessimism, from despair to hope, from gloom to doom, in recent years.
More of the same yesterday, with the emphasis firmly on the negative. The Foreign Affairs Minister, David Andrews, has said in the past that if the Belfast Agreement is to work there must be "parity of discomfort as well as of comfort". Plenty of discomfort yesterday, but no sign of a deal.