r be forgotten. Never can I
sufficiently thank you. I know how much it has cost you. But here is the
end of your trials. All the rest is now my task. Rely on me with your
whole heart. Let them not misuse you: otherwise do their bidding. Be sure
of my knowing how you are treated, and at the slightest act of injustice
I shall be beside you to take you to myself. Be sure of that, and be not
unhappy. They shall not keep you from me for long. Submit a short while
to the will of your parents: mine you will find the stronger. Resolve it
in your soul that I, your lover, cannot fail, for it is impossible to me
to waver. Consider me as the one fixed light in your world, and look to
me. Soon, then! Have patience, be true, and we are one!'

He kissed cold lips, he squeezed an inanimate hand. The horribly empty
sublimity of his behaviour appeared to her in her mother's contemptuous
face.

His eyes were on her as he released her and she stood alone. She seemed a
dead thing; but the sense of his having done gloriously in mastering
himself to give these worldly people of hers a lesson and proof that he
could within due measure bow to their laws and customs, dispelled the
brief vision of her unfitness to be left. The compressed energy of the
man under his conscious display of a great-minded deference to the claims
of family ties and duties, intoxicated him. He thought but of the present
achievement and its just effect: he had cancelled a bad reputation among
these people, from whom he was about to lead forth a daughter for Alvan's
wife, and he reasoned by the grandeur of his exhibition of
generosity--which was brought out in strong relief when he delivered his
retiring bow to the Frau von Rudiger's shoulder--that the worst was over;
he had to deal no more with silly women: now for Clotilde's father! Women
were privileged to oppose their senselessness to the divine fire: men
could not retreat behind such defences; they must meet him on the common
ground of men, where this constant battler had never yet encountered a
reverse.

Clotilde's cold staring gaze, a little livelier to wonderment than to
reflection, observed him to be scrupulous of the formalities in the
diverse character of his parting salutations to her mother, her sister;
and the lady of the house. He was going--he could actually go and leave
her! She stretched herself to him faintly; she let it be seen that she
did so as much as she had force to make it visible. She saw him