aid the colonel.

'She has him by the worst half of him. Her correspondence with me--her
letter to excuse her insolence, which she does like a prim chit--throws a
light on the girl she is. She will set him aiming at power to trick her
out in the decorations. She will not keep him to his labours to
consolidate the power. She will pervert the aesthetic in him, through her
hold on his material nature, his vanity, his luxuriousness. She is one of
the young women who begin timidly, and when they see that they enjoy
comparative impunity, grow intrepid in dissipation, and that palling,
they are ravenously ambitious. She will drive him at his mark before the
time is ripe--ruin-him. He is a Titan, not a god, though god-like he
seems in comparison with men. He would be fleshly enough in any hands.
This girl will drain him of all his nobler fire.'

'She shows mighty little of the inclination,' said the colonel.

'To you. But when they come together? I know his voice!'

The colonel protested his doubts of their coming together.

'Ultimately?' the baroness asked, and brooded. 'But she will have to see
him; and then will she resist him? I shall change one view of her if she
does.'

'She will shirk the interview,' Tresten remarked. 'Supposing they meet: I
don't think much will come of it, unless they meet on a field, and he has
an hour's grace to catch her up and be off with her. She's as calm as the
face of a clock, and wags her Yes and No about him just as unconcernedly
as a clock's pendulum. I've spoken to many a sentinel outpost who wasn't
deader on the subject in monosyllables than mademoiselle. She has a
military erectness, and answers you and looks you straight at the eyes,
perfectly unabashed by your seeing "the girl she is," as you say. She
looked at me downright defying me to despise her. Alvan has been tricked
by her colour: she's icy. She has no passion. She acts up to him when
they're together, and that deceives him. I doubt her having
blood--there's no heat in it, if she has.'

'And he cajoled Count Hollinger to send an envoy to see him righted!' the
baroness ejaculated. 'Hollinger is not a sentimental person, I assure
you, and not likely to have taken a step apparently hostile to the
Rudigers, if he had not been extraordinarily shaken by Alvan. What
character of man is this Dr. Storchel?'

Tresten described Count Hollinger's envoy, so quaintly deputed to act the
part of legal umpire in a family business, as a mi