Kill, he meant, the aerial wild spirit he could admire as her character, when he had the prospect of extinguishing it in his grasp.

‘What do you meditate killing?’ said the baroness.

‘The fool of the years behind me,’ he replied, ’and entering on my forty-first a sage.’

‘To be the mate and equal of your companion?’

’To prove I have had good training under the wisest to act as her guide and master.’

‘If she—­’ the baroness checked her exclamation, saying:  ’She declined to come to me.  I would have plumbed her for some solid ground, something to rest one’s faith on.  Your Pyrrhas, Glyceras, and others of the like, were not stable persons for a man of our days to bind his life to one of them.  Harness is harness, and a light yoke-fellow can make a proud career deviate.’

‘But I give her a soul!’ said Alvan.  ’I am the wine, and she the crystal cup.  She has avowed it again and again.  You read her as she is when away from me.  Then she is a reed, a weed, what you will; she is unfit to contend when she stands alone.  But when I am beside her, when we are together—­the moment I have her at arms’ length she will be part of me by the magic I have seen each time we encountered.  She knows it well.’

‘She may know it too well.’

‘For what?’ He frowned.

‘For the chances of your meeting.’

‘You think it possible she will refuse?’

A blackness passing to lividness crossed his face.  He fetched a big breath.

’Then finish my history, shut up the book; I am a phantom of a man, and everything written there is imposture!  I can account for all that she has done hitherto, but not that she should refuse to see me.  Not that she should refuse to see me now when I come armed to demand it!  Refuse?  But I have done my work, done what I said I would do.  I stand in my order of battle, and she refuses?  No!  I stake my head on it!  I have not a clod’s perception, I have not a spark of sense to distinguish me from a flat-headed Lapp, if she refuses:—­call me a mountebank who has gained his position by clever tumbling; a lucky gamester; whatever plays blind with chance.’

He started up in agitation.  ’Lucie!  I am a grinning skull without a brain if that girl refuses!  She will not.’  He took his hat to leave, adding, to seem rational to the cool understanding he addressed:  ’She will not refuse; I am bound to think so in common respect for myself; I have done tricks to make me appear a rageing ape if she—­oh! she cannot, she will not refuse.  Never!  I have eyes, I have wits, I am not tottering yet on my grave—­or it’s blindly, if I am.  I have my clear judgement, I am not an imbecile.  It seems to me a foolish suspicion that she can possibly refuse.  Her manners are generally good; freakish, but good in the main.  Perhaps she takes a sting . . . but there is no sting here.  It would be bad manners to refuse; to say nothing of . . . she has a heart!  Well, then,