As it happened cruelly for Alvan, the woman who had become the radiant indistinct in his desiring mind was one whom he knew to be of a shivery stedfastness.  His plucking her from another was neither wonderful nor indefensible; they two were suited as no other two could be; the handsome boy who had gone through a form of plighting with her was her slave, and she required for her mate a master:  she felt it and she sided to him quite naturally, moved by the sacred direction of the acknowledgement of a mutual fitness.  Twice, however, she had relapsed on the occasions of his absence, and owning his power over her when they were together again, she sowed the fatal conviction that he held her at present, and that she was a woman only to be held at present, by the palpable grasp of his physical influence.  Partly it was correct, not entirely, seeing that she kept the impression of a belief in him even when she drifted away through sheer weakness, but it was the single positive view he had of her, and it was fatal, for it begat a devil of impatience.

‘They are undermining her now—­now—­now!’

He started himself into busy frenzies to reach to her, already indifferent to the means, and waxing increasingly reckless as he fed on his agitation.  Some faith in her, even the little she deserved, would have arrested him:  unhappily he had less than she, who had enough to nurse the dim sense of his fixity, and sank from him only in her heart’s faintness, but he, when no longer flattered by the evidence of his mastery, took her for sand.  Why, then, had he let her out of his grasp?  The horrid echoed interrogation flashed a hideous view of the woman.  But how had he come to be guilty of it? he asked himself again; and, without answering him, his counsellors to that poor wisdom set to work to complete it:  Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant Duplicity.  He wrote to Clotilde, with one voice quoting the law in their favour, with another commanding her to break it.  He gathered and drilled a legion of spies, and showered his gold in bribes and plots to get the letter to her, to get an interview—­one human word between them.

CHAPTER X

His friend Colonel von Tresten was beside him when he received the enemy’s counter-stroke.  Count Walburg and his companion brought a letter from Clotilde—­no reply; a letter renouncing him.

Briefly, in cold words befitting the act, she stated that the past must be dead between them; for the future she belonged to her parents; she had left the city.  She knew not where he might be, her letter concluded, but henceforward he should know that they were strangers.

Alvan held out the deadly paper when he had read the contents; he smote a forefinger on it and crumpled it in his hand.  That was the dumb oration of a man shocked by the outrage upon passionate feeling to the state of brute.  His fist, outstretched to the length of his arm, shook the reptile letter under a terrible frown.