tilde. He was presently summoned to meet Count Walburg and another
intimate of the family, in the hotel downstairs. These gentlemen brought
no message from General von Rudiger: their words were directed to
extract a promise from him that he would quit his pursuit of Clotilde,
and of course he refused; they hinted that the General might have
official influence to get him expelled the city, and he referred them
to the proof; but he looked beyond the words at a new something of
extraordinary and sinister aspect revealed to him in their manner of
treating his pretensions to the hand of the lady.

He had not yet perfectly seen the view the world took of him, because
of his armed opposition to the world; nor could he rightly reflect on
it yet, being too anxious to sign the peace. He felt as it were a blow
startling him from sleep. His visitors tasked themselves to be strictly
polite; they did not undervalue his resources for commanding respect
between man and man. The strange matter was behind their bearing, which
indicated the positive impossibility of the union of Clotilde with one
such as he, and struck at the curtain covering his history. He could
not raise it to thunder his defence of himself, or even allude to the
implied contempt of his character: with a boiling gorge he was
obliged to swallow both the history and the insult, returning them the
equivalent of their courtesies, though it was on his lips to thunder
heavily.

A second endeavour, in an urgent letter before nightfall to gain him
admission to head-quarters, met the same repulse as the foregoing. The
bearer of it was dismissed without an answer.

Alvan passed a night of dire disturbance. The fate of the noble Genoese
conspirator, slipping into still harbour water on the step from boat to
boat, and borne down by the weight of his armour in the moment of the
ripeness of his plot at midnight, when the signal for action sparkled
to lighten across the ships and forts, had touched him in his boy's
readings, and he found a resemblance of himself to Fiesco, stopped as he
was by a base impediment, tripped ignominiously, choked by the weight of
the powers fitting him for battle. A man such as Alvan, arrested on his
career by an opposition to his enrolment of a bride!--think of it! What
was this girl in a life like his? But, oh! the question was no sooner
asked than the thought that this girl had been in this room illuminated
the room, telling him she might have been h