detested the monotony, her craven soul fawned for the comfort.  After her many recent whippings the comfort was immensely desireable, but a glance at the monotony gave it the look of a burial, and standing in her attitude of resignation under Colonel von Tresten’s hard military stare she could have shrieked for Alvan to come, knowing that she would have cowered and trembled at the scene following his appearance.  Yet she would have gone to him; without any doubt his presence and the sense of his greater power declared by his coming would have lifted her over to him.  The part of her nature adoring storminess wanted only a present champion to outweigh the other part which cuddled security.  Colonel von Tresten, however, was very far from offering himself in such a shape to a girl that had jilted the friend he loved, insulted the woman he esteemed; and he stood there like a figure of soldierly complacency in marble.  Her pencilled acknowledgement of the baroness’s letter, and her reply to it almost as much, was construed as an intended insult to that lady, whose champion Tresten was.  He had departed before Clotilde heard a step.

Immediately thereupon it came:  to her mind that Tresten was one of Alvan’s bosom friends.  How, then, could he be of neither party?  And her father spoke of him as an upright rational man, who, although, strangely enough, he entertained, as it appeared, something like a profound reverence for the baroness, could see and confess the downright impossibility of the marriage Alvan proposed.  Tresten, her father said, talked of his friend Alvan as wild and eccentric, but now becoming convinced that such a family as hers could never tolerate him—­considering his age, his birth, his blood, his habits, his politics, his private entanglements and moral reputation, it was partly hinted.

She shuddered at this false Tresten.  He and the professor might be strung together for examples of perfidy!  His reverence of the baroness gave his cold blue eyes the iciness of her loathed letter.  Alvan, she remembered, used to exalt him among the gallantest of the warriors dedicating their swords to freedom.  The dedication of the sword, she felt sure, was an accident:  he was a man of blood.  And naturally, she must be hated by the man reverencing the baroness.  If ever man had executioner stamped on his face, it was he!  Like the professor, nay, like Alvan himself, he would not see that she was the victim of tyranny:  none of her signs would they see.  They judged of her by her inanimate frame in the hands of her torturers breaking her on the wheel.  She called to mind a fancy that she had looked at Tresten out of her deadness earnestly for just one instant:  more than an instant she could not, beneath her father’s vigilant watch and into those repellant cold blue butcher eyes.  Tresten might clearly have understood the fleeting look.  What were her words! what her deeds!