y 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 away all save the adamantine within us, if there be
ought of that besides the breathing structure. The reason why she wept
with so delirious a persistency was, that her nature felt the necessity
for draining her of her self-pitifulness, knowing that it nourished the
love whereby she was tormented. They do not weep thus who have a heart
for the struggle. In the morning she was a dried channel of tears,
no longer self-pitiful; careless of herself, as she thought: in other
words, unable any further to contend.

Reality was too strong! This morning her sisters came to her room
imploring her to yield:--if she married Alvan, what could be their
prospect