O that woman!  She has murdered love.  She has blotted love completely out.  She is the arch-thief and assassin of mankind—­the female Apollyon.  He lost sight of her in the prodigious iniquity covering her sex with a cowl of night, and it was what women are, what women will do, the one and all alike simpering simulacra that men find them to be, soulless, clogs on us, bloodsuckers! until a feature of the particular sinner peeped out on him, and brought the fresh agony of a reminder of his great-heartedness.  ’For that woman—­Tresten, you know me—­I would have sacrificed for that woman fortune and life, my hope, my duty, my immortality.  She knew it, and she—­look!’ he unwrinkled the letter carefully for it to be legible, and clenched it in a ball.’  Signs her name, signs her name, her name!—­God of heaven! it would be incredible in a holy chronicle—­signs her name to the infamous harlotry!  See:  “Clotilde von Rudiger.”  It’s her writing; that’s her signature:  “Clotilde” in full.  You’d hardly fancy that, now?  But look!’ the colonel’s eyelids were blinking, and Alvan dinted his finger-nail under her name:  ’there it is:  Clotilde:  signed shamelessly.  Just as she might have written to one of her friends about bonnets, and balls, and books!  Henceforward strangers, she and I?’

His laughter, even to Tresten, a man of camps, sounded profane as a yell beneath a cathedral dome.  ’Why, the woman has been in my hands—­I released her, spared her, drilled brain and blood, ransacked all the code, to do her homage and honour in every mortal way; and we two strangers!  Do you hear that, Tresten?  Why, if you had seen her!—­she was lost, and I, this man she now pierces with ice, kept hell down under bolt and bar-worse, I believe, broke a good woman’s heart! that never a breath should rise that could accuse her on suspicion, or in malice, or by accident, justly, or with a shadow of truth.  “I think it best for us both.”  So she thinks for me!  She not only decides, she thinks; she is the active principle; ’tis mine to submit.—­A certain presumption was in that girl always.  Ha! do you hear me?  Her letter may sting, it shall not dupe.  Strangers?  Poor fool!  You see plainly she was nailed down to write the thing.  This letter is a flat lie.  She can lie—­Oh! born to the art! born to it!—­lies like a Saint tricking Satan!  But she says she has left the city.  Now to find her!’

He began marching about the room with great strides.  ’I ’ll have the whole Continent up; her keepers shall have no rest; I ’ll have them by the Law Courts; and by stratagem, and, if law and cunning fail, force.  I have sworn it.  I have done all that honour can ask of a man; more than any man, to my knowledge, would have done, and now it’s war.  I declare war on them.  They will have it!  I mean to take that girl from them—­snatch or catch!  The girl is my girl, and if there are laws against my having my own, to powder with the laws!  Well, and do you suppose me likely to be beaten?  Then Cicero was a fiction, and Caesar a people’s legend.  Not if they are history, and eloquence and commandership have power over the blood and souls of men.  First, I write to her!’