the room, conceiving
with much strangeness of sentiment under these hard stripes of
misfortune, that reality had come. The monster had hold of her. She was
isolated, fed like a dungeoned captive. She had nothing but our natural
obstinacy to hug, or seem to do so when wearifulness reduced her to cling
to the semblance of it only. 'I marry Alvan!' was her iterated answer to
her father, on his visits to see whether he had yet broken her; and she
spoke with the desperate firmness of weak creatures that strive to nail
themselves to the sound of it. He listened and named his time for
returning. The tug between rigour and endurance continued for about forty
hours. She then thought, in an exhaustion: 'Strange that my father should
be so fiercely excited against this man! Can he have reasons I have not
heard of?' Her father's unwonted harshness suggested the question in her
quailing nature, which was beginning to have a movement to kiss the whip.
The question set her thinking of the reasons she knew. She saw them
involuntarily from the side of parents, and they wore a sinister
appearance; in reality her present scourging was due to them as well as
to Alvan's fatal decision. Her misery was traceable to his conduct and
his judgement--both bad. And yet all this while he might be working to
release her, near upon rescuing! She swung round to the side of her lover
against these executioner parents, and scribbled to him as well as she
could under the cracks in her windowshutters, urging him to appear. She
spent her heart on it. A note to her friend, the English lady, protested
her love for Alvan, but with less abandonment, with a frozen resignation
to the loss of him--all around her was so dark! By-and-by there was a
scratching at her door. The maid whom she trusted brought her news of
Alvan: outside the door and in, the maid and mistress knelt. Hope
flickered up in the bosom of Clotilde: the whispers were exchanged
through the partition.

'Where is he?'

'Gone.'

'But where?'

'He has left the city.'

Clotilde pushed the letter for her friend under the door: that one for
Alvan she retained, stung by his desertion of her, and thinking
practically that it was useless to aim a letter at a man without an
address. She did not ask herself whether the maid's information was
honest, for she wanted to despair, as the exhausted want to lie down.

She wept through the night. It was one of those nights of the torrents of
tears which wash