by the stranger.  What matters which of them toiled to bring them to so sweet an end!  It was not either of them, but Love.  By and by, after acting serenest innocent, suddenly broken, she will be copious of sad confessions.  That will be in their secresy:  in the close and boundless together of clasped hands.  Deep eyes, that give him in realms of light within light all that he has dreamed of rapturousness and blessedness, you are threatened with a blinding kiss if you look abashed:—­if her voice shall dare repeat another of those foolish self-reproaches, it shall be construed as a petition for further kisses.  Silence! he said to her, imagining that he had been silent, and enjoying silence with a perfect quietude beyond the trouble of a thought of her kisses and his happiness.  His full heart craved for the infinity of silence.

Another moment and he was counting to her the days, hours, minutes, which had been the gulf of torture between then and now—­the separation and the reunion:  he was voluble, living to speak, and a pause was only for the drawing of most blissful breath.

His watch went slowly.  She was beginning to drop her eyelids in front of Tresten.  Oh! he knew her so well.  He guessed the length of her acting, and the time for her earnestness.  She would have to act a coquette at first to give herself a countenance; and who would not pardon the girl for putting on a mask? who would fail to see the mask?  But he knew her so well:  she would not trifle very long:  his life on it, that she will soon falter! her bosom will lift, lift and check:  a word from Tresten then, if he is a friend, and she melts to the truth in her.  Alvan heard her saying:  ’I will see him yes, to-day.  Let him appoint.  He may come when he likes—­come at once’

‘My life on it!’ he swore by his unerring knowledge of her, the certainty that she loved him.

He had walked into a quarter of the town strange to him, he thought; he had no recollection of the look of the street.  A friend came up and put him in the right way, walking back with him.  This was General Leczel, a famous leader of one of the heroical risings whose passage through blood and despair have led to the broader law men ask for when they name freedom devotedly.  Alvan stated the position of his case to Leczel with continental frankness regarding a natural theme, and then pursued the talk on public affairs, to the note of:  ’What but knocks will ever open the Black-Yellow Head to the fact that we are no longer in the first years of the eighteenth century!’

Leczel left him at his hotel steps, promising to call on him before night.  Tresten had not returned, neither he nor the advocate, and he had been absent fully an hour.  He was not in sight right or left.  Alvan went to his room, looked at his watch, and out of the window, incapable of imagining any event.  He began to breathe as if an atmosphere thick as water were pressing round him.  Unconsciously he had