Now she was aware that Alvan moved behind the screen concealing him.  A common friend of Alvan and her family talked to her of him.  He was an eminent professor, a middleaged, grave and honourable man, not ignorant that her family entertained views opposed to the pretensions of such a man as the demagogue and Jew.  Nevertheless Alvan could persuade him to abet the scheme for his meeting Clotilde; nay, to lead to it; ultimately to allow his own house to be their place of meeting.  Alvan achieved the first of the steps unassisted.  Whether or not his character stood well with a man of the world, his force of character, backed by solid attainments in addition to brilliant gifts, could win a reputable citizen and erudite to support him.  Rhetoric in a worthy cause has good chances of carrying the gravest, and the cause might reasonably seem excellent to the professor when one promising fair to be the political genius of his time, but hitherto not the quietest of livers, could make him believe that marriage with this girl would be his clear salvation.  The second step was undesignedly Clotilde’s.

She was on the professor’s arm at one of the great winter balls of her conductor’s brethren in 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.’