ived her, the glorious lover
she had imaged in her mind was put aside with some of the angry disdain
she bestowed upon the woman by whom she had been wounded. He ceased to be
a visioned Alvan, and became an obscurity; her principal sentiment in
relation to him was, that he threatened her peace. But for him she would
never have been taught to hate her parents; she would have enjoyed the
quiet domestic evenings with her people, when Marko sang, and her sisters
knitted, and the betrothed sister wore a look very enviable in the
abstract; she would be seeing a future instead of a black iron gate! But
for him she certainly would never have had, that letter from the
baroness!

On the morning after the information of Alvan's return, her father, who
deserved credit as a tactician, came to her to say that Alvan had sent to
demand his letters and presents. The demand was unlike what her stunned
heart recollected of Alvan; but a hint that the baroness was behind it,
and that a refusal would bring the baroness down on her with another
piece of insolence, was effective. She dealt out the letters, arranged
the presents, made up the books, pamphlets, trinkets, amulet coins, lock
of black hair, and worn post-marked paper addressed in his hand to
Clotilde von Rudiger, carefully; and half as souvenir, half with the
forlorn yearning of the look of lovers when they break asunder--or of one
of them--she signed inside the packet not 'Clotilde,' but the gentlest
title he had bestowed on her, trusting to the pathos of the word 'child'
to tell him that she was enforced and still true, if he should be
interested in knowing it. Weak souls are much moved by having the pathos
on their side. They are consoled too.

Time passed, whole days: the tender reminder had no effect on him! It had
been her last appeal: she reflected that she had really felt when he had
not been feeling at all: and this marks a division.

She was next requested to write a letter to Alvan, signifying his release
by the notification of her engagement to Prince Marko. She was personally
to deliver it to a gentleman who was of neither party, and who would give
her a letter from Alvan in exchange, which, while assuring the gentleman
she was acting with perfect freedom, she was to be under her oath not to
read, and dutifully to hand to Marko, her betrothed. Her father assumed
the fact of her renewed engagement to the prince, as her whole family
did; strangely, she thought: it struc