ad jilted the friend he loved,
insulted the woman he esteemed; and he stood there like a figure of
soldierly complacency in marble. Her pencilled acknowledgement of the
baroness's letter, and her reply to it almost as much, was construed as
an intended insult to that lady, whose champion Tresten was. He had
departed before Clotilde heard a step.

Immediately thereupon it came: to her mind that Tresten was one of
Alvan's bosom friends. How, then, could he be of neither party? And her
father spoke of him as an upright rational man, who, although, strangely
enough, he entertained, as it appeared, something like a profound
reverence for the baroness, could see and confess the downright
impossibility of the marriage Alvan proposed. Tresten, her father said,
talked of his friend Alvan as wild and eccentric, but now becoming
convinced that such a family as hers could never tolerate
him--considering his age, his birth, his blood, his habits, his politics,
his private entanglements and moral reputation, it was partly hinted.

She shuddered at this false Tresten. He and the professor might be strung
together for examples of perfidy! His reverence of the baroness gave his
cold blue eyes the iciness of her loathed letter. Alvan, she remembered,
used to exalt him among the gallantest of the warriors dedicating their
swords to freedom. The dedication of the sword, she felt sure, was an
accident: he was a man of blood. And naturally, she must be hated by the
man reverencing the baroness. If ever man had executioner stamped on his
face, it was he! Like the professor, nay, like Alvan himself, he would
not see that she was the victim of tyranny: none of her signs would they
see. They judged of her by her inanimate frame in the hands of her
torturers breaking her on the wheel. She called to mind a fancy that she
had looked at Tresten out of her deadness earnestly for just one instant:
more than an instant she could not, beneath her father's vigilant watch
and into those repellant cold blue butcher eyes. Tresten might clearly
have understood the fleeting look. What were her words! what her deeds!

The look was the truth revealed-her soul. It begged for life like an
infant; and the man's face was an iron rock in reply! No wonder--he
worshipped the baroness! So great was Clotilde's hatred of him that it
overflooded the image of Alvan, who called him friend, and deputed him to
act as friend. Such blindness, weakness, folly, on the part of on