before the time is ripe--ruin-him. He is a Titan, not a god, though
god-like he seems in comparison with men. He would be fleshly enough in
any hands. This girl will drain him of all his nobler fire.'

'She shows mighty little of the inclination,' said the colonel.

'To you. But when they come together? I know his voice!'

The colonel protested his doubts of their coming together.

'Ultimately?' the baroness asked, and brooded. 'But she will have to see
him; and then will she resist him? I shall change one view of her if she
does.'

'She will shirk the interview,' Tresten remarked. 'Supposing they meet:
I don't think much will come of it, unless they meet on a field, and he
has an hour's grace to catch her up and be off with her. She's as
calm as the face of a clock, and wags her Yes and No about him just
as unconcernedly as a clock's pendulum. I've spoken to many a sentinel
outpost who wasn't deader on the subject in monosyllables than
mademoiselle. She has a military erectness, and answers you and looks
you straight at the eyes, perfectly unabashed by your seeing "the girl
she is," as you say. She looked at me downright defying me to despise
her. Alvan has been tricked by her colour: she's icy. She has no
passion. She acts up to him when they're together, and that deceives
him. I doubt her having blood--there's no heat in it, if she has.'

'And he cajoled Count Hollinger to send an envoy to see him righted!'
the baroness ejaculated. 'Hollinger is not a sentimental person, I
assure you, and not likely to have taken a step apparently hostile to
the Rudigers, if he had not been extraordinarily shaken by Alvan. What
character of man is this Dr. Storchel?'

Tresten described Count Hollinger's envoy, so quaintly deputed to act
the part of legal umpire in a family business, as a mild man of law with
no ideas or interests outside the law; spectacled, nervous, formal,
a stranger to the passions; and the baroness was amused to hear of
Storchel and Alvan's placid talk together upon themes of law, succeeded
by the little advocate's bewildered fright at one of Alvan's gentler
explosions. Tresten sketched it. The baroness realized it, and shut her
lips tight for a laugh of essential humour.

CHAPTER XIV

Late in the day Alvan was himself able to inform her that he had
overcome Clotilde's father after a struggle of hours. The General had
not consented to everything: he had granted enough, evidently in terror
of the