fullest right to revile her: it cannot
be too widely known. I could cry: "What wisdom there is in men when
they are mad!" We must allow it to counterbalance breaches of ordinary
courtesy. "With the name--she deserves," you say?

He pitched the very name at her character plainly?--called her what she
is?'

The baroness could have borne to hear it: she had no feminine horror
of the staining epithet for that sex. But a sense of the distinction
between camps and courts restrained the soldier. He spoke of a discharge
of cuttlefish ink at the character of the girl, and added: 'The bath's a
black one for her, and they had better keep it private. Regrettable, no
doubt, but it 's probably true, and he 's out of his mind. It would be
dangerous to check him: he'd force his best friend to fight. Leczel is
with him and gives him head. It 's about time for me to go back to him,
for there may be business.'

The baroness thought it improbable. She was hoping that with Alvan's
eruption the drop-scene would fall.

Tresten spoke of the possibility. He knew the contents of the letter,
and knew further that a copy of it, with none of the pregnant syllables
expunged, had been forwarded to Prince Marko. He counselled calm waiting
for a certain number of hours. The baroness committed herself to a
promise to wait. Now that Alvan had broken off from the baleful girl,
the worst must have been passed, she thought.

He had broken with the girl: she reviewed him under the light of that
sole fact. So the edge of the cloud obscuring him was lifted, and he
would again be the man she prized and hoped much of! How thickly he had
been obscured was visible to her through a retreating sensation of
scorn of him for his mad excesses, which she had not known herself
to entertain while he was writhing in the toils, and very bluntly and
dismissingly felt now that his madness was at its climax. An outrageous
lunatic fit, that promised to release him from his fatal passion,
seemed, on the contrary, respectable in essence if not in the display.
Wives he should have by fifties and hundreds if he wanted them, she
thought in her great-heartedness, reflecting on the one whose threatened
pretensions to be his mate were slain by the title flung at her, and
merited. The word (she could guess it) was an impassable gulf, a wound
beyond healing. It pronounced in a single breath the girl's right name
and his pledge of a return to sanity. For it was the insanest he could