the law, and he said: 'Alvan is here.' She
answered: 'No, he has not yet come.'--How could she tell that he was not
present in the crowd?

'Has he come now?' said the professor.

'No.'

And no Alvan was discernible.

'Now?'

'Not yet.'

The professor stared about. She waited.

'Now he has come; he is in the room now,' said Clotilde.

Alvan was perceived. He stood in the centre of the throng surrounding
him to buzz about some recent pamphlet.

She could well play at faith in his magnetization of her, for as by
degrees she made herself more nervously apprehensive by thinking of him,
it came to an overclouding and then a panic; and that she took for the
physical sign of his presence, and by that time, the hour being late,
Alvan happened to have arrived. The touch of his hand, the instant
naturalness in their speaking together after a long separation, as if
there had not been an interval, confirmed her notion of his influence
on her, almost to the making it planetary. And a glance at the professor
revealed how picturesque it was. Alvan and he murmured aside. They spoke
of it: What wonder that Alvan, though he saw Prince Marko whirl her in
the dance, and keep her to the measure--dancing like a song of the limbs
in his desperate poor lover's little flitting eternity of the possession
of her--should say, after she had been led back to her friends: 'That is
he, then! one of the dragons guarding my apple of the Hesperides, whom I
must brush away.'

'He?' replied Clotilde, sincerely feeling Marko to be of as fractional
a weight as her tone declared him. 'Oh, he is my mute, harmless, he does
not count among the dragons.'

But there had been, notwithstanding the high presumption of his remark,
a manful thickness of voice in Alvan's 'That is he!' The rivals had
fastened a look on one another, wary, strong, and summary as the
wrestlers' first grapple. In fire of gaze, Marko was not outdone.

'He does not count? With those eyes of his?' Alvan exclaimed. He knew
something of the sex, and spied from that point of knowledge into the
character of Clotilde; not too venturesomely, with the assistance of
rumour, hazarding the suspicion which he put forth as a certainty, and
made sharply bitter to himself in proportion to the belief in it
that his vehemence engendered: 'I know all--without exception;
all, everything; all! I repeat. But what of it, if I win you? as I
shall--only aid me a little.'

She slightly surprised the m