ex to the people of the path they
should take to triumph--must take, as triumph they must sooner or later:
not by the route of what is called Progress--pooh! That is a middle-class
invention to effect a compromise. With the people the matter rests with
their intelligence! meanwhile my star is bright and shines reflected.'

'I notice,' she said, favouring him with as much reflection as a splendid
lover could crave for, 'that you never look down, you never look on the
ground, but always either up or straight before you.'

'People have remarked it,' said he, smiling. 'Here we are at this
funereal tree again. All roads lead to Rome, and ours appears to conduct
us perpetually to this tree. It 's the only dead one here.'

He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branches
decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the
small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass.
It was very witch-like, of a witch in her incantation-smoke.

'Not a single bare spot! but dead, dead as any peeled and fallen!' said
Alvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen. 'This is a tree for a
melancholy poet--eh, Clotilde?--for him to come on it by moonlight, after
a scene with his mistress, or tales of her! By the way and by the way, my
fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind of garb for
me, should I be ordered off the first to join the dusky army below. Women
who put on their dead husbands in public are not well-mannered women,
though they may be excellent professional widows, excellent!'

He snapped the lichen-dust from his fingers, observing that he was not
sure the contrast of the flourishing and blighted was not more impressive
in sunlight: and then he looked from the tree to his true love's hair.
The tree at a little distance seemed run over with sunless lizards: her
locks were golden serpents.

'Shall I soon see your baroness?' Clotilde asked him.

'Not in advance of the ceremony,' he answered. 'In good time. You
understand--an old friend making room for a new one, and that one young
and beautiful, with golden tresses; at first . . . ! But her heart is
quite sound. Have no fear! I guarantee it; I know her to the roots. She
desires my welfare, she does my behests. If I am bound to her by
gratitude, so, and in a greater degree, is she to me. The utmost she will
demand is that my bride shall be worthy of me--a good mate for me in the
fight to come; and I have t