‘That letter is despatched?’

‘Rudiger has it by this time.’

The baroness fixed her eyes on Tresten:  she struck her lap.  ’Alvan!  Is it he?  But the General is old, gouty, out of the lists.  There can be no fighting.  He apologized to you for his daughter’s insolence to me.  He will not fight, be sure.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Tresten said.

’As for the girl, Alvan has the fullest right to revile her:  it cannot be too widely known.  I could cry:  “What wisdom there is in men when they are mad!” We must allow it to counterbalance breaches of ordinary courtesy.  “With the name—­she deserves,” you say?

He pitched the very name at her character plainly?—­called her what she is?’

The baroness could have borne to hear it:  she had no feminine horror of the staining epithet for that sex.  But a sense of the distinction between camps and courts restrained the soldier.  He spoke of a discharge of cuttlefish ink at the character of the girl, and added:  ’The bath’s a black one for her, and they had better keep it private.  Regrettable, no doubt, but it ’s probably true, and he ’s out of his mind.  It would be dangerous to check him:  he’d force his best friend to fight.  Leczel is with him and gives him head.  It ’s about time for me to go back to him, for there may be business.’

The baroness thought it improbable.  She was hoping that with Alvan’s eruption the drop-scene would fall.

Tresten spoke of the possibility.  He knew the contents of the letter, and knew further that a copy of it, with none of the pregnant syllables expunged, had been forwarded to Prince Marko.  He counselled calm waiting for a certain number of hours.  The baroness committed herself to a promise to wait.  Now that Alvan had broken off from the baleful girl, the worst must have been passed, she thought.

He had broken with the girl:  she reviewed him under the light of that sole fact.  So the edge of the cloud obscuring him was lifted, and he would again be the man she prized and hoped much of!  How thickly he had been obscured was visible to her through a retreating sensation of scorn of him for his mad excesses, which she had not known herself to entertain while he was writhing in the toils, and very bluntly and dismissingly felt now that his madness was at its climax.  An outrageous lunatic fit, that promised to release him from his fatal passion, seemed, on the contrary, respectable in essence if not in the display.  Wives he should have by fifties and hundreds if he wanted them, she thought in her great-heartedness, reflecting on the one whose threatened pretensions to be his mate were slain by the title flung at her, and merited.  The word (she could guess it) was an impassable gulf, a wound beyond healing.  It pronounced in a single breath the girl’s right name and his pledge of a return to sanity.  For it was the insanest he could do; it uttered anathema on his love of her; it painted