ur 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 smiling
incomprehensibly, like a winner of the field to be left to the enemy.
She could get nothing from him but that insensible round smile, and she
took the ebbing of her poor effort for his rebuff.

'You that offered yourself in flight to him who once proposed it, he had
the choice of you and he abjured you. He has cast you off!'

She phrased it in speech to herself. It was incredible, but it was
clear: he had gone.

The room was vacant; the room was black and silent as a dungeon.

'He will not have you: he has handed you back to them the more readily
to renounce you.'

She framed the words half aloud in a moan as she glanced at her mother