y of so formidable a cat-screech not being possible, she
stood in an attitude of mild resignation, revolving thoughts of her
father's praises of his noble daughter, her mother's kiss, the caresses
of her sisters, and the dark bright eyes of Marko, the peace of the
domestic circle. This was her happiness! And still there was time, still
hope for Alvan to descend and cut the knot. She conceived it slowly,
with some flush of the brain like a remainder of fever, but no throbs of
her pulses. She had been swayed to act against him by tales which in her
heart she did not credit exactly, therefore did not take within herself,
though she let them influence her by the goad of her fears and angers;
and these she could conjure up at will for the defence of her conduct,
aware of their shallowness, and all the while trusting him to come in
the end and hear her reproaches for his delay. He seemed to her now to
have the character of a storm outside a household wrapped in comfortable
monotony. Her natural spiritedness detested the monotony, her craven
soul fawned for the comfort. After her many recent whippings the comfort
was immensely desireable, but a glance at the monotony gave it the look
of a burial, and standing in her attitude of resignation under Colonel
von Tresten's hard military stare she could have shrieked for Alvan
to come, knowing that she would have cowered and trembled at the scene
following his appearance. Yet she would have gone to him; without any
doubt his presence and the sense of his greater power declared by his
coming would have lifted her over to him. The part of her nature adoring
storminess wanted only a present champion to outweigh the other part
which cuddled security. Colonel von Tresten, however, was very far from
offering himself in such a shape to a girl that had 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,