O that I had your beautiful sedateness!  I do admire it, madam.  I wish I could imitate.’  She carried her dramatic ingenuousness farthel still by saying:  ’I have seen your photograph’; implying that the inimitable, the much coveted air of composure breathed out of yonder presentment of her features.  ’For I can’t call you good looking,’ she said within herself, for the satisfaction of her sense of candour, of her sense of contrast as well.  And shutting her eyes, she thought of the horrid penitent a harsh-faced woman in confession must be: 

The picture sent her swimmingly to the confessional, where sat a man with his head in a hood, and he soon heard enough of mixed substance to dash his hood, almost his head, off.  Beauty may be immoderately frank in soul to the ghostly.  The black page comprised a very long list.  ’But put this on the white page,’ says she to the surging father inside his box—­ ‘I loved Alvan!’ A sentence or two more fetches the Alvanic man jumping out of the priest:  and so closely does she realize it that she has to hunt herself into a corner with the question, whether she shall tell him she guessed him to be no other than her lover.  ’How could you expect a girl, who is not a Papist, to come kneeling here?’ she says.  And he answers with no matter what of a gallant kind.

In this manner her natural effervescence amused her sorrowful mind while gazing from her chamber window at the mountain sides across the valley, where tourists, in the autumnal season, sweep up and down like a tidal river.  She had ceased to weep; she had outwept the colour of her eyes and the consolation of weeping.  Dressed in black to the throat, she sat and waited the arrival of her phantom friend, the baroness—­that angel! who proved her goodness in consenting to be the friend of Alvan’s beloved, because she was the true friend of Alvan!  How cheap such a way of proving goodness, Clotilde did not consider.  She wanted it so.

The mountain heights were in dusty sunlight.  She had seen them day after day thinly lined on the dead sky, inviting thunder and doomed to sultriness.  She looked on the garden of the house, a desert under bee and butterfly.  Looking beyond the garden she perceived her father on the glaring road, and one with him, the sight of whom did not flush her cheek or spring her heart to a throb, though she pitied the poor boy:  he was useless to her, utterly.

Soon her Indian Bacchus was in her room, and alone with her, and at her feet.  Her father had given him hope.  He came bearing eyes that were like hope’s own; and kneeling, kissing her hands, her knees, her hair, he seemed unaware that she was inanimate.

There was nothing imaginable in which he could be of use.

He was only another dust-cloud of the sultry sameness.  She had been expecting a woman, a tempest choral with sky and mountain and valley-hollows, as the overture to Alvan’s appearance.