tting their
shores, if they diverge from the avenue of hotel-keepers and waiters:
but Clotilde pointed out to him that her English friend was not showing
coldness in devoting herself to her child.

'No, they attend to their duties,' he assented generally, desperately
just.

'And you owe it to her that you have seen me.'

'I do,' he said, and forthwith courted the lady to be forgiven.

Clotilde was taken from him in a heavy downpour and trailing of mists.

At the foot of the mountain a boy handed her a letter from Alvan--a
burning flood, rolled out of him like lava after they had separated
on the second plateau, and confided to one who knew how to outstrip
pathfarers. She entered her hotel across the lake, and met a telegram.
At night the wires flashed 'Sleep well' to her; on her awakening,
'Good morning.' A lengthened history of the day was telegraphed for her
amusement. Again at night there was a 'God guard you!'

'Who can resist him?' sighed Clotilde, excited, nervous, flattered,
happy, but yearning to repose and be curtained from the buzz of the
excess of life that he put about her. This time there was no prospect of
his courtship relapsing.

'He is a wonderful, an ideal lover!' replied her friend.

'If he were only that!' said Clotilde, musing expressively. 'If, dear
Englishwoman, he were only that, he might be withstood. But Alvan mounts
high over such lovers: he is a wonderful and ideal man: so great, so
generous, heroical, giant-like, that what he wills must be.'

The Englishwoman was quick enough to seize an indication difficult to
miss--more was expected to be said of him.

'You see the perfect gentleman in Dr. Alvan,' she remarked, for she had
heard him ordering his morning bath at the hotel, and he had also been
polite to her under vexation.

Clotilde nodded hurriedly; she saw something infinitely greater, and
disliked the bringing of that island microscope to bear upon a giant.
She found it repugnant to hear a word of Alvan as a perfect gentleman.
Justly, however, she took him for a splendid nature, and assuming upon
good authority that the greater contains the lesser, she supposed the
lesser to be a chiselled figure serviceably alive in the embrace.

BOOK 2.

CHAPTER VII

He was down on the plains to her the second day, and as usual when they
met, it was as if they had not parted; his animation made it seem so.
He was like summer's morning sunlight, his warmth striking instantly