reduced her to cling to the semblance of it only.  ‘I marry Alvan!’ was her iterated answer to her father, on his visits to see whether he had yet broken her; and she spoke with the desperate firmness of weak creatures that strive to nail themselves to the sound of it.  He listened and named his time for returning.  The tug between rigour and endurance continued for about forty 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.