reluctant or conniving; and he harangued the people, he bore off his captive, he held her firmly as he had sworn he would; he defied authority, he was a public rebel—­he with his detected little secret aim, which he nursed like a shamed mother of an infant, fond but afraid to be proud of it!  She had seen that he aimed at standing well with the world and being one with it honourably:  holding to his principles of course:  but a disposition that way had been perceived, and the vision of him in open rebellion because of his shy catching at the thread of an alliance with the decorous world, carved an ironic line on her jaw.

Full surely he would not be baffled without smiting the world on the face.  And he might suffer for it; the Rudigers would suffer likewise.

She considered them very foolish people.  Her survey of the little nobility beneath her station had previously enabled her to account for their disgust of such a suitor as Alvan, and maintain that they would oppose him tooth and nail.  Owing to his recent success, the anticipation of a peaceful surrender to him seemed now on the whole to carry most weight.  This girl gives Alvan her hand and her family repudiate her.  Volatile, flippant, shallow as she is, she must have had some turn for him; a physical spell was on her once, and it will be renewed when they meet.  It sometimes inspires a semblance of courage; she may determine; she may be stedfast long enough for him to take his measures to bear her away.  And the Brocken witches congratulate him on his prize!

Almost better would it be, she thought, that circumstance should thwart him and kindle his own demon element.

The forenoon, the noon, the afternoon, went round.

Late in the evening her door was flung wide for Colonel von Tresten.

She looked her interrogative ‘Well?’ His features were not used to betray the course of events.

‘How has it gone?’ she said.

He replied:  ’As I told you.  I fancied I gauged the hussy pretty closely.’

‘She will not see him?’

‘Not she.’

The baroness crossed her arms.

‘And Alvan?’

The colonel shrugged.  It was not done to tease a tremulous woman, for she was calm.  It painted the necessary consequence of the refusal:  an explosion of AEtna, and she saw it.

‘Where is he now?’ said she.

‘At his hotel.’

‘Alone?’

‘Leczel is with him.’

‘That looks like war.’

Tresten shrugged again.  ’It might have been foreseen by everybody concerned in the affair.  The girl does not care for him one corner of an eye!  She stood up before us cool as at a dancing-lesson, swore she had never committed herself to an oath to him, sneered at him.  She positively sneered.  Her manner to me assures me without question that if he had stood in my place she would have insulted him: 

’Scarcely.  She would do in his absence what she would not do under his eyes,’ remarked the baroness.  ‘It’s decided, then?’