Clotilde had been in this room; she had furnished proof that she could be trusted now.  She had committed herself, perished as a maiden of society, and her parents, even the senseless mother, must see it and decide by it.  The General would bring her to reason:  General von Rudiger was a man of the world.  An honourable son-in-law could not but be acceptable to him—­now, at least.  And such a son-in-law would ultimately be the pride of his house.  ’A flower from thy garden, friend, and my wearing it shall in good time be cause for some parental gratification.’

The letter despatched, Alvan paced his chamber with the ghost of Clotilde.  He was presently summoned to meet Count Walburg and another intimate of the family, in the hotel downstairs.  These gentlemen brought no message from General von Rudiger:  their words were directed to extract a promise from him that he would quit his pursuit of Clotilde, and of course he refused; they hinted that the General might have official influence to get him expelled the city, and he referred them to the proof; but he looked beyond the words at a new something of extraordinary and sinister aspect revealed to him in their manner of treating his pretensions to the hand of the lady.

He had not yet perfectly seen the view the world took of him, because of his armed opposition to the world; nor could he rightly reflect on it yet, being too anxious to sign the peace.  He felt as it were a blow startling him from sleep.  His visitors tasked themselves to be strictly polite; they did not undervalue his resources for commanding respect between man and man.  The strange matter was behind their bearing, which indicated the positive impossibility of the union of Clotilde with one such as he, and struck at the curtain covering his history.  He could not raise it to thunder his defence of himself, or even allude to the implied contempt of his character:  with a boiling gorge he was obliged to swallow both the history and the insult, returning them the equivalent of their courtesies, though it was on his lips to thunder heavily.

A second endeavour, in an urgent letter before nightfall to gain him admission to head-quarters, met the same repulse as the foregoing.  The bearer of it was dismissed without an answer.

Alvan passed a night of dire disturbance.  The fate of the noble Genoese conspirator, slipping into still harbour water on the step from boat to boat, and borne down by the weight of his armour in the moment of the ripeness of his plot at midnight, when the signal for action sparkled to lighten across the ships and forts, had touched him in his boy’s readings, and he found a resemblance of himself to Fiesco, stopped as he was by a base impediment, tripped ignominiously, choked by the weight of the powers fitting him for battle.  A man such as Alvan, arrested on his career by an opposition to his enrolment of a bride!—­think of it!  What was this girl in a life like his?