mstance, to give the world assurance that
the man is a temple fit for the rites. Out of romances, he is not
melodiously composed. And in a giant are various giants to be slain, or
thoroughly subdued, ere this divinity is taken for leader. It is not done
by miracle.

As it happened cruelly for Alvan, the woman who had become the radiant
indistinct in his desiring mind was one whom he knew to be of a shivery
stedfastness. His plucking her from another was neither wonderful nor
indefensible; they two were suited as no other two could be; the handsome
boy who had gone through a form of plighting with her was her slave, and
she required for her mate a master: she felt it and she sided to him
quite naturally, moved by the sacred direction of the acknowledgement of
a mutual fitness. Twice, however, she had relapsed on the occasions of
his absence, and owning his power over her when they were together again,
she sowed the fatal conviction that he held her at present, and that she
was a woman only to be held at present, by the palpable grasp of his
physical influence. Partly it was correct, not entirely, seeing that she
kept the impression of a belief in him even when she drifted away through
sheer weakness, but it was the single positive view he had of her, and it
was fatal, for it begat a devil of impatience.

'They are undermining her now--now--now!'

He started himself into busy frenzies to reach to her, already
indifferent to the means, and waxing increasingly reckless as he fed on
his agitation. Some faith in her, even the little she deserved, would
have arrested him: unhappily he had less than she, who had enough to
nurse the dim sense of his fixity, and sank from him only in her heart's
faintness, but he, when no longer flattered by the evidence of his
mastery, took her for sand. Why, then, had he let her out of his grasp?
The horrid echoed interrogation flashed a hideous view of the woman. But
how had he come to be guilty of it? he asked himself again; and, without
answering him, his counsellors to that poor wisdom set to work to
complete it: Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant
Duplicity. He wrote to Clotilde, with one voice quoting the law in their
favour, with another commanding her to break it. He gathered and drilled
a legion of spies, and showered his gold in bribes and plots to get the
letter to her, to get an interview--one human word between them.

CHAPTER X

His friend Colonel von Tr