fury would not distinguish her as Clotilde, though the name had started him, and it was his knowledge of the particular sinner which drew down his curses on the sex.  He twisted his body, hugging at his breast as if he had her letter sticking in his ribs.  The letter was up against his ribs, and he thumped it, crushed it, patted it; he kissed it, and flung it, stamped on it, and was foul-mouthed.  Seeing it at his feet, he bent to it like a man snapped in two, lamenting, bewailing himself, recovering sight of her fragmentarily.  It stuck in his ribs, and in scorn of the writer, and sceptical of her penning it, he tugged to pull it out, and broke the shaft, but left the rankling arrow-head:—­she had traced the lines, and though tyranny racked her to do that thing, his agony followed her hand over the paper to her name, which fixed and bit in him like the deadly-toothed arrow-head called asp, and there was no uprooting it.  The thing lived; her deed was the woman; there was no separating them:  witness it in love murdered.

O that woman!  She has murdered love.  She has blotted love completely out.  She is the arch-thief and assassin of mankind—­the female Apollyon.  He lost sight of her in the prodigious iniquity covering her sex with a cowl of night, and it was what women are, what women will do, the one and all alike simpering simulacra that men find them to be, soulless, clogs on us, bloodsuckers! until a feature of the particular sinner peeped out on him, and brought the fresh agony of a reminder of his great-heartedness.  ’For that woman—­Tresten, you know me—­I would have sacrificed for that woman fortune and life, my hope, my duty, my immortality.  She knew it, and she—­look!’ he unwrinkled the letter carefully for it to be legible, and clenched it in a ball.’  Signs her name, signs her name, her name!—­God of heaven! it would be incredible in a holy chronicle—­signs her name to the infamous harlotry!  See:  “Clotilde von Rudiger.”  It’s her writing; that’s her signature:  “Clotilde” in full.  You’d hardly fancy that, now?  But look!’ the colonel’s eyelids were blinking, and Alvan dinted his finger-nail under her name:  ’there it is:  Clotilde:  signed shamelessly.  Just as she might have written to one of her friends about bonnets, and balls, and books!  Henceforward strangers, she and I?’

His laughter, even to Tresten, a man of camps, sounded profane as a yell beneath a cathedral dome.  ’Why, the woman has been in my hands—­ I released her, spared her, drilled brain and blood, ransacked all the code, to do her homage and honour in every mortal way; and we two strangers!  Do you hear that, Tresten?  Why, if you had seen her!—­she was lost, and I, this man she now pierces with ice, kept hell down under bolt and bar-worse, I believe, broke a good woman’s heart! that never a breath should rise that could accuse her on suspicion, or in malice, or by accident, justly, or with a shadow of truth.  “I think it