er, Nuciotti blew
his brains out. He'd have been alive now if he had been left alone.
Furious cursing is a natural relief to some men, like women's weeping. He
has written a savage letter to her father, sending the girl to the deuce
with the name she deserves, and challengeing the General.'

'That letter is despatched?'

'Rudiger has it by this time.'

The baroness fixed her eyes on Tresten: she struck her lap. 'Alvan! Is it
he? But the General is old, gouty, out of the lists. There can be no
fighting. He apologized to you for his daughter's insolence to me. He
will not fight, be sure.'

'Perhaps not,' Tresten said.

'As for the girl, Alvan has the fullest right to revile her: it cannot be
too widely known. I could cry: "What wisdom there is in men when they are
mad!" We must allow it to counterbalance breaches of ordinary courtesy.
"With the name--she deserves," you say?

He pitched the very name at her character plainly?--called her what she
is?'

The baroness could have borne to hear it: she had no feminine horror of
the staining epithet for that sex. But a sense of the distinction between
camps and courts restrained the soldier. He spoke of a discharge of
cuttlefish ink at the character of the girl, and added: 'The bath's a
black one for her, and they had better keep it private. Regrettable, no
doubt, but it 's probably true, and he 's out of his mind. It would be
dangerous to check him: he'd force his best friend to fight. Leczel is
with him and gives him head. It 's about time for me to go back to him,
for there may be business.'

The baroness thought it improbable. She was hoping that with Alvan's
eruption the drop-scene would fall.

Tresten spoke of the possibility. He knew the contents of the letter, and
knew further that a copy of it, with none of the pregnant syllables
expunged, had been forwarded to Prince Marko. He counselled calm waiting
for a certain number of hours. The baroness committed herself to a
promise to wait. Now that Alvan had broken off from the baleful girl, the
worst must have been passed, she thought.

He had broken with the girl: she reviewed him under the light of that
sole fact. So the edge of the cloud obscuring him was lifted, and he
would again be the man she prized and hoped much of! How thickly he had
been obscured was visible to her through a retreating sensation of scorn
of him for his mad excesses, which she had not known herself to entertain
while he was writhing in