ough of mixed substance to dash
his hood, almost his head, off. Beauty may be immoderately frank in soul
to the ghostly. The black page comprised a very long list. 'But put this
on the white page,' says she to the surging father inside his box--'I
loved Alvan!' A sentence or two more fetches the Alvanic man jumping out
of the priest: and so closely does she realize it that she has to hunt
herself into a corner with the question, whether she shall tell him she
guessed him to be no other than her lover. 'How could you expect a girl,
who is not a Papist, to come kneeling here?' she says. And he answers
with no matter what of a gallant kind.

In this manner her natural effervescence amused her sorrowful mind while
gazing from her chamber window at the mountain sides across the valley,
where tourists, in the autumnal season, sweep up and down like a tidal
river. She had ceased to weep; she had outwept the colour of her eyes and
the consolation of weeping. Dressed in black to the throat, she sat and
waited the arrival of her phantom friend, the baroness--that angel! who
proved her goodness in consenting to be the friend of Alvan's beloved,
because she was the true friend of Alvan! How cheap such a way of proving
goodness, Clotilde did not consider. She wanted it so.

The mountain heights were in dusty sunlight. She had seen them day after
day thinly lined on the dead sky, inviting thunder and doomed to
sultriness. She looked on the garden of the house, a desert under bee and
butterfly. Looking beyond the garden she perceived her father on the
glaring road, and one with him, the sight of whom did not flush her cheek
or spring her heart to a throb, though she pitied the poor boy: he was
useless to her, utterly.

Soon her Indian Bacchus was in her room, and alone with her, and at her
feet. Her father had given him hope. He came bearing eyes that were like
hope's own; and kneeling, kissing her hands, her knees, her hair, he
seemed unaware that she was inanimate.

There was nothing imaginable in which he could be of use.

He was only another dust-cloud of the sultry sameness. She had been
expecting a woman, a tempest choral with sky and mountain and
valley-hollows, as the overture to Alvan's appearance.

But he roused her. With Marko she had never felt her cowardice, and his
passionately beseeching, trembling, 'Will you have me?' called up the
tiger in the girl; in spite of pity for his voice she retorted on her
parents: