a master: she felt it and she
sided to him quite naturally, moved by the sacred direction of the
acknowledgement of a mutual fitness. Twice, however, she had relapsed
on the occasions of his absence, and owning his power over her when they
were together again, she sowed the fatal conviction that he held her
at present, and that she was a woman only to be held at present, by the
palpable grasp of his physical influence. Partly it was correct, not
entirely, seeing that she kept the impression of a belief in him even
when she drifted away through sheer weakness, but it was the single
positive view he had of her, and it was fatal, for it begat a devil of
impatience.

'They are undermining her now--now--now!'

He started himself into busy frenzies to reach to her, already
indifferent to the means, and waxing increasingly reckless as he fed on
his agitation. Some faith in her, even the little she deserved, would
have arrested him: unhappily he had less than she, who had enough to
nurse the dim sense of his fixity, and sank from him only in her heart's
faintness, but he, when no longer flattered by the evidence of his
mastery, took her for sand. Why, then, had he let her out of his grasp?
The horrid echoed interrogation flashed a hideous view of the woman. But
how had he come to be guilty of it? he asked himself again; and, without
answering him, his counsellors to that poor wisdom set to work to
complete it: Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant
Duplicity. He wrote to Clotilde, with one voice quoting the law in their
favour, with another commanding her to break it. He gathered and drilled
a legion of spies, and showered his gold in bribes and plots to get the
letter to her, to get an interview--one human word between them.

CHAPTER X

His friend Colonel von Tresten was beside him when he received the
enemy's counter-stroke. Count Walburg and his companion brought a letter
from Clotilde--no reply; a letter renouncing him.

Briefly, in cold words befitting the act, she stated that the past must
be dead between them; for the future she belonged to her parents; she
had left the city. She knew not where he might be, her letter concluded,
but henceforward he should know that they were strangers.

Alvan held out the deadly paper when he had read the contents; he
smote a forefinger on it and crumpled it in his hand. That was the dumb
oration of a man shocked by the outrage upon passionate feeling to the
st