the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as
its shadow; a vision of blackness.

'I will compose a beautiful, dutiful, modest, oddest, beseeching,
screeching, mildish, childish epistle to her, and you shall read it, and
if you approve it, we shall despatch it,' said Clotilde.

'There speaks my gold-crested serpent at her wisest!' replied Alvan.
'And now for my visit to your family: I follow you in a day. En
avant! contre les canons! A run to Lake Leman brings us to them in the
afternoon. I shall see you in the evening. So our separation won't be
for long this time. All the auspices are good. We shall not be rich--nor
poor.'

Clotilde reminded him that a portion of money would be brought to the
store by her.

'We don't count it,' said he. 'Not rich, certainly. And you will not
expect me to make money by my pen. Above all things I detest the writing
for money. Fiction and verse appeal to a besotted public, that judges
of the merit of the work by the standard of its taste: avaunt! And
journalism for money is Egyptian bondage. No slavery is comparable to
the chains of hired journalism. My pen is my fountain--the key of me;
and I give my self, I do not sell. I write when I have matter in me and
in the direction it presses for, otherwise not one word!'

'I would never ask you to sell yourself,' said Clotilde. 'I would rather
be in want of common comforts.'

He squeezed her wrist. They were again in front of the black-draped
blighted tree. It was the sole tree of the host clad thus in scurf
bearing a semblance of livid metal. They looked at it as having seen it
before, and passed on.

'But the wife of Sigismund Alvan will not be poor in renown!' he
resumed, radiating his full bloom on her.

'My highest ambition is to be Sigismund Alvan's wife!' she exclaimed.

To hear her was as good as wine, and his heart came out on a genial
chuckle. 'Ay, the choice you have made is not, by heaven, so bad.
Sigismund Alvan's wife shall take the foremost place of all. Look at
me.' He lifted his head to the highest on his shoulders, widening his
eagle eyes. He was now thoroughly restored and in his own upper element,
expansive after the humiliating contraction of his man's vanity under
the glances of a girl. 'Do you take me for one who could be content with
the part of second? I will work and do battle unceasingly, but I will
have too the prize of battle to clasp it, savour it richly. I was not
fashioned to be the lean meek martyr of