e of
Alvan's pretensions, incurred a shade of her contempt. She had not ever
thought of him coldly: hitherto it would have seemed a sacrilege; but now
she said definitely, the friend of Tresten cannot be the man I supposed
him! and she ascribed her capacity for saying it, and for perceiving and
adding up Alvan's faults of character, to the freezing she had taken from
that most antipathetic person. She confessed to sensations of spite which
would cause her to reject and spurn even his pleadings for Alvan, if they
were imaginable as actual. Their not being imaginable allowed her to
indulge her naughtiness harmlessly, for the gratification of the idea of
wounding some one, though it were her lover, connected with this Tresten.

The letter of the baroness and the visit of the woman's admirer had
vitiated Clotilde's blood. She was not only not mistress of her thoughts,
she was undirected either in thinking or wishing by any desires, except
that the people about her should caress and warm her, until, with no gaze
backward, she could say good-bye to them, full of meaning as a good-bye
to the covered grave, as unreluctantly as the swallow quits her
eaves-nest in autumn: and they were to learn that they were chargeable
with the sequel of the history. There would be a sequel, she was sure, if
it came only to punish them for the cruelty which thwarted her timid
anticipation of it by pressing on her natural instinct at all costs to
bargain for an escape from pain, and making her simulate contentment to
cheat her muffled wound and them.

CHAPTER XIII

His love meantime was the mission and the burden of Alvan, and he was not
ashamed to speak of it and plead for it; and the pleading was not done
troubadourishly, in soft flute-notes, as for easement of tuneful emotions
beseeching sympathy. He was liker to a sturdy beggar demanding his crust,
to support life, of corporations that can be talked into admitting the
rights of man; and he vollied close logical argumentation, on the basis
of the laws, in defence of his most natural hunger, thunder in his breast
and bright new heavenly morning alternating or clashing while the
electric wires and post smote him with evil tidings of Clotilde, and the
success of his efforts caught her back to him. Daily many times he
reached to her and lost her, had her in his arms and his arms withered
with emptiness. The ground he won quaked under him. All the evidence
opposed it, but he was in action,