plied: 'Oh! do that.'

She half turned to Alvan, rigid with an entreaty that hung on his coming
voice.

'No!' said Alvan, shocked in both pride and vanity. 'Plain-dealing; no
subterfuge! Begin with foul falsehood? No. I would not have you burdened,
madame, with the shadow of a conventional untruth on our account. And
when it would be bad policy? . . . Oh, no, worse than the sin! as the
honest cynic says. We will go down to Madame von Rudiger, and she shall
make acquaintance with the man who claims her daughter's hand.'

Clotilde rocked in an agony. Her friend was troubled. Both ladies knew
what there would be to encounter better than he. But the man, strong in
his belief in himself, imposed his will on them.

Alvan and Clotilde clasped hands as they went downstairs to Madame
Emerly's reception room. She could hardly speak: 'Do not forsake me.'

'Is this forsaking?' He could ask it in the deeply questioning tone which
supplies the answer.

'Oh, Alvan!' She would have said: 'Be warned.'

He kissed her fingers. 'Trust to me.'

She had to wrap her shivering spirit in a blind reliance and utter
leaning on him.

She could almost have said: 'Know me better'; and she would, sincere as
her passion in its shallow vessel was, have been moved to say it for a
warning while yet there was time to leave the house instead of turning
into that room, had not a remainder of her first exaltation (rapidly
degenerating to desperation) inspired her with the thought of her being a
part of this handsome, undaunted, triumph-flashing man.

Such a state of blind reliance and utter leaning, however, has a certain
tendency to disintegrate the will, and by so doing it prepares the spirit
to be a melting prize of the winner.

Men and women alike, who renounce their own individuality by cowering
thus abjectly under some other before the storm, are in reality abjuring
their idea of that other, and offering themselves up to the genius of
Power in whatsoever direction it may chance to be manifested, in
whatsoever person. We no sooner shut our eyes than we consent to be prey,
we lose the soul of election.

Mark her as she proceeds. For should her hero fail, and she be suffering
through his failure and her reliance on him, the blindness of it will
seem to her to have been an infinite virtue, anything but her deplorable
weakness crouching beneath his show of superhuman strength. And it will
seem to her, so long as her sufferings endure, that he