The Price He Paid — page 226: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

vf A VACATION IN THE CAPITAL. 217 hand, and there will be an end of them, I fancy; but if things should come to the worst, he has the troops to protect him.” Gabrielle was silent. She had not thought of any specific danger, but, inexperienced as she was in all the serious affairs of life, she divined that an open attack, such as Winterfeld’s, would not pass by without leaving its mark, and felt, as it were, a prescience Of some coming storm. She and her mother were to be sheltered from it, evidently. In no plainer language could the baron have told her that all was really over between them. Was he not sending her to the capital, where George now lived, where a meeting with him could easily be managed? The baroness was very far from divining her daugbter’s train of thought; she did not even remem- ber that Assessor Winterfeld was living in the metropolis, still less that he had been sent thither expressly to prevent any intercourse between him and the governor’s heiress. The lady had weightier matters to occupy her just now. On leaving his sister-in-law, the baron had him- self at once driven over to Colonel Wilten’s quar- ters. He had always been on friendly terms with the commandant of the garrison, and latterly there had been an increase of cordiality, on the Wiltens’ part at least, for the family were bent on securing an alliance between the eldest hope of their house and the young Baroness von Harder. To-day, however, there was a something unusual in the colonel’s manner and reception of his visitor, a certain constraint which he did his best to con- ceal by talking with more fluency than was his wont. The baron did not heed this. His mind was busy with other thoughts, and he was not disposed to attach importance to such trifles. He was about to turn the conversation to those measures of public safety which were still to some extent in the hands of the military, when Wilten forstalled him, and said rather hurriedly: “Have you received further intelligence from the capital yet? You are, no doubt, expecting an ans- wer relative to that Winterfeld pamphlet?” Eomichboo cS (E(@)