After his deed of loftiness Alvan walked to his hotel, where the sight of the room Clotilde had entered that morning caught his breath.

He proceeded to write his first letter to General von Rudiger, repressing his heart's intimations that he had stepped out of the friendly path, and was on a strange and tangled one.

The sense of power in him was leonine enough to promise the forcing of a way whithersoever the path: yet did that ghost of her figure across the room haunt him with searching eyes.

They set him spying over himself at an actor who had not needed to be acting his part, brilliant though it was.

He crammed his energy into his idea of the part, to carry it forward victoriously.
Before the world, it would without question redound to his credit, and he heard the world acclaiming him: 'Alvan's wife was honourably won, as became the wife of a Doctor of Law, from the bosom of her family, when he could have had her in the old lawless fashion, for a call to a coachman! Alvan, the republican, is eminently a citizen.