but was
to remain in the prison at Alby. She thereupon dismissed the carriage
that was waiting for her, betook herself to an inn near by, where she
asked for a room, and wrote a letter to her father--a few feverishly
agitated sentences: "I know no longer what is truth and what is
falsehood; Bastide is innocent, and I have destroyed him, though my
desire was to help him; Yes and No are in my breast like two
extinguished flames; if I were to return whence I came I should suffer
a continual death; for that reason and because people live as they do,
I go where I must." It was already past midnight when she asked to
speak to the host. She requested him to send the letter in the morning
to Chateau Perrie by a reliable messenger; she then asked the startled
man to sell her a small basket of fresh fruit. The host expressed a
polite regret that he had nothing more in his storeroom. Passionately
urgent, she offered him ten, twentyfold its value and threw a gold
piece on the table. "It is for a dying person," she said, "everything
depends upon it." The man gazed anxiously at the pallid, gleaming
countenance of the distinguished looking woman and pondered, declaring
finally that he would rouse his neighbor, and bidding her wait. Left
alone, she knelt down by the bedside, buried her face in the pillows
and wept. After half an hour the host returned, carrying a basket full
of pears, grapes, pomegranates, and peaches. Shaking his head, he
followed her with his eyes as she hastened away, and held the sealed
letter, which he was to forward, inquisitively up to the light.

The streets were desolate and bathed in shadowy moonlight. The windows
of the little houses were blinking drowsily; under a gateway stood the
night-watchman with a halberd and mumbled like a drunken man. In front
of the low prison building there was an open space; Clarissa seated
herself on a stone bench, and, as there was a pump near by and she felt
thirsty, drank her fill. The softly swelling outlines of the hills
melted almost imperceptibly into the sky, and behind a depression in
the landscape a fire-light was glowing; she seemed to hear, too, on
listening intently, the ringing of bells. The whole world was not
asleep, then, and she could link her anxious heart to human concerns
once more. After a time she rose, stepped over to the building, set the
basket of fruit on the ground, and knocked with the knocker at the
gate. It was a long while before the door-keeper