his white glow of unreason and fierce ire at the scorn which her behaviour flung upon every part of his character that was tenderest with him.  After speaking such things a man comes to his senses or he dies.  So thought the baroness, and she was not more than commonly curious to hear how the Rudigers had taken the insult they had brought on themselves, and not unwilling to wait to see Alvan till he was cool.  His vanity, when threatening to bleed to the death, would not be civil to the surgeon before the second or third dressing of his wound.

CHAPTER XVIII

In the house of the Rudigers there was commotion.  Clotilde sat apart from it, locked in her chamber.  She had performed her crowning act of obedience to her father by declining the interview with Alvan, and as a consequence she was full of grovelling revolt.

Two things had helped her to carry out her engagement to submit in this final instance of dutifulness—­one was the sight of that hateful rigid face and glacier eye of Tresten; the other was the loophole she left for subsequent insurgency by engaging to write to Count Hollinger’s envoy, Dr. Storchel.  She had gazed most earnestly at him, that he might not mistake her meaning, and the little man’s pair of spectacles had, she fancied, been dim.  He was touched.  Here was a friend!  Here was the friend she required, the external aid, the fresh evasion, the link with Alvan!  Now to write to him to bind him to his beautiful human emotion.  By contrast with the treacherous Tresten, whose iciness roused her to defiance, the nervous little advocate seemed an emissary of the skies, and she invoked her treasure-stores of the craven’s craftiness in revolt to compose a letter that should move him, melt the good angel to espouse her cause.  He was to be taught to understand—­nay, angelically he would understand at once—­why she had behaved apparently so contradictorily.  Fettered, cruelly constrained by threats and wily sermons upon her duty to her family, terrorized, a prisoner ’beside this blue lake, in sight of the sublimest scenery of earth,’ and hating his associate—­hating him, she repeated and underscored—­she had belied herself; she was willing to meet Alvan, she wished to meet him.  She could open her heart to Alvan’s true friend—­his only true friend.  He would instantly discern her unhappy plight.  In the presence of his associate she could explain nothing, do nothing but what she had done.  He had frozen her.  She had good reason to know that man for her enemy.  She could prove him a traitor to Alvan.  Certain though she was from the first moment of Dr. Storchel’s integrity and kindness of heart, she had stood petrified before him, as if affected by some wicked spell.  She owned she had utterly belied herself; she protested she had been no free agent.

The future labours in her cause were thrown upon Dr. Storchel’s shoulders, but with such compliments to him on his mission from above as emissary angels are presumed to be sensibly affected by.