‘I know all; what matters that to me?’ Even her silence, extending the ‘all’ beyond limits, as it did to the over-knowing man, who could number these indicative characteristics of the young woman:  impulsive, without will, readily able to lie:  her silence worked no discord in him.  He would have remarked, that he was not looking out for a saint, but rather for a sprightly comrade, perfectly feminine, thoroughly mastered, young, graceful, comely, and a lady of station.  Once in his good keeping, her lord would answer for her.  And this was a manfully generous view of the situation.  It belongs to the robustness of the conqueror’s mood.  But how of his opinion of her character in the fret of a baffling, a repulse, a defeat?  Supposing the circumstances not to have helped her to shine as a heroine, while he was reduced to appear no hero to himself!  Wise are the mothers who keep vigilant personal watch over their girls, were it only to guard them at present, from the gentleman’s condescending generosity, until he has become something more than robust in his ideas of the sex—­say, for lack of the ringing word, fraternal.

Clotilde never knew, and Alvan would have been unable to date, the origin of the black thing flung at her in time to come—­when the man was frenzied, doubtless, but it was in his mind, and more than froth of madness.

After the night of the ball they met beneath the sanctioning roof of the amiable professor; and on one occasion the latter, perhaps waxing anxious, and after bringing about the introduction of Clotilde to the sister of Alvan, pursued his prudent measures bypassing the pair through a demi-ceremony of betrothal.  It sprang Clotilde astride nearer to reality, both actually and in feeling; and she began to show the change at home.  A rebuff that came of the coupling of her name with Alvan’s pushed her back as far below the surface as she had ever been.  She waited for him to take the step she had again implored him not yet to take; she feared that he would, she marvelled at his abstaining; the old wheel revolved, as it ever does with creatures that wait for circumstances to bring the change they cannot work for themselves; and once more the two fell asunder.  She had thoughts of the cloister.  Her venerable relative died joining her hand to Prince Marko’s; she was induced to think of marriage.  An illness laid her prostrate; she contemplated the peace of death.

Shortly before she fell sick the prince was a guest of her father’s, and had won the household by his perfect amiability as an associate.  The grace and glow, and some of the imaginable accomplishments of an Indian Bacchus were native to him.  In her convalescence, she asked herself what more she could crave than the worship of a godlike youth, whom she in return might cherish, strengthening his frail health with happiness.  For she had seen how suffering ate him up; he required no teaching in the Spartan virtue of suffering, wolf-gnawed, silently.  But he was a flower in sunshine to happiness, and he looked to her for it.  Why should she withhold from him a thing so easily given?  The convalescent is receptive and undesiring, or but very faintly desiring:  the new blood coming into the frame like first dawn of light has not stirred the old passions; it is infant nature, with a tinge of superadded knowledge that is not cloud across it and lends it only a tender wistfulness.