course he refused; they hinted that the General might have official
influence to get him expelled the city, and he referred them to the
proof; but he looked beyond the words at a new something of extraordinary
and sinister aspect revealed to him in their manner of treating his
pretensions to the hand of the lady.

He had not yet perfectly seen the view the world took of him, because of
his armed opposition to the world; nor could he rightly reflect on it
yet, being too anxious to sign the peace. He felt as it were a blow
startling him from sleep. His visitors tasked themselves to be strictly
polite; they did not undervalue his resources for commanding respect
between man and man. The strange matter was behind their bearing, which
indicated the positive impossibility of the union of Clotilde with one
such as he, and struck at the curtain covering his history. He could not
raise it to thunder his defence of himself, or even allude to the implied
contempt of his character: with a boiling gorge he was obliged to swallow
both the history and the insult, returning them the equivalent of their
courtesies, though it was on his lips to thunder heavily.

A second endeavour, in an urgent letter before nightfall to gain him
admission to head-quarters, met the same repulse as the foregoing. The
bearer of it was dismissed without an answer.

Alvan passed a night of dire disturbance. The fate of the noble Genoese
conspirator, slipping into still harbour water on the step from boat to
boat, and borne down by the weight of his armour in the moment of the
ripeness of his plot at midnight, when the signal for action sparkled to
lighten across the ships and forts, had touched him in his boy's
readings, and he found a resemblance of himself to Fiesco, stopped as he
was by a base impediment, tripped ignominiously, choked by the weight of