on to his captive. Her coming cleared
everything.

Clotilde introduced him to her friends, and he was enrolled a member of
the party. His appearance was that of a man to whom the sphinx has
whispered. They ascended to the topmost of the mountain stages, to
another caravanserai of tourists, whence the singular people emerge in
morning darkness night-capped and blanketed, and behold the great orb of
day at his birth--he them.

Walking slowly beside Clotilde on the mountain way, Alvan said: 'Two
wishes! Mine was in your breast. You wedded yours to it. At last!--and we
are one. Not a word more of time lost. My wish is almost a will in
itself--was it not?--and has been wooing yours all this while!--till the
sleeper awakened, the well-spring leapt up from the earth; and our two
wishes united dare the world to divide them. What can? My wish was your
destiny, yours is mine. We are one.' He poetized on his passion, and
dramatized it: 'Stood you at the altar, I would pluck you from the man
holding your hand! There is no escape for you. Nay, into the vaults, were
you to grow pale and need my vital warmth--down to the vaults! Speak--or
no: look! That will do. You hold a Titan in your eyes, like metal in the
furnace, to turn him to any shape you please, liquid or solid. You make
him a god: he is the river Alvan or the rock Alvan: but fixed or flowing,
he is lord of you. That is the universal penalty: you must, if you have
this creative soul, be the slave of your creature: if you raise him to
heaven, you must be his! Ay, look! I know the eyes! They can melt
granite, they can freeze fire. Pierce me, sweet eyes! And now flutter,
for there is that in me to make them.'

'Consider!' Clotilde flutteringly entreated him.

'The world? you dear heaven of me! Looking down on me does not compromise
you, and I am not ashamed of my devotions. I sat in gloom: you came: I
saw my goddess and worshipped. The world, Lutece, the world is a variable
monster; it rends the weak whether sincere or false; but those who weld
strength with sincerity may practise their rites of religion publicly,
and it fawns to them, and bellows to imitate. Nay, I say that strength in
love is the sole sincerity, and the world knows it, muffs it in the air
about us, and so we two are privileged. Politically also we know that
strength is the one reality: the rest is shadow. Behind the veil of our
human conventions power is constant as ever, and to perceive the fact is
to ha