e city here--name her, quick!--one you
can trust,' he said, and fondled her hastily, much as a gentle kind of
drillmaster straightens a fair pupil's shoulders. 'Yes, you have shown
courage. Now it must be submission to me. You shall be no runaway bride,
but honoured at the altar. Out of this hotel is the first point. You
know some such lady?'

Clotilde tried to remonstrate and to suggest. She could have prophesied
certain evil from any evasion of the straight line of flight; she was so
sure of it because of her intuition that her courage had done its utmost
in casting her on him, and that the remainder within her would be a
drawing back. She could not get the word or even the look to encounter
his close and warm imperiousness; and, hesitating, she noticed where
they were together alone. She could not refuse the protection he offered
in a person of her own sex; and now, flushing with the thought of where
they were together alone, feminine modesty shrivelled at the idea of
entreating a man to bear her off, though feminine desperation urged
to it. She felt herself very bare of clothing, and she named a lady, a
Madame Emerly, living near the hotel. Her heart sank like a stone. 'It
is for you!' cried Alvan, keenly sensible of his loss and his generosity
in temporarily resigning her--for a subsequent triumph. 'But my wife
shall not be snatched by a thief in the night. Are you not my wife--my
golden bride? And you may give me this pledge of it, as if the vows had
just been uttered... and still I resign you till we speak the vows. It
shall not be said of Alvan's wife, in the days of her glory, that she
ran to her nuptials through rat-passages.'

His pride in his prevailingness thrilled her. She was cooled by her
despondency sufficiently to perceive where the centre of it lay,
but that centre of self was magnificent; she recovered some of her
enthusiasm, thinking him perhaps to be acting rightly; in any case they
were united, her step was irrevocable. Her having entered the hotel, her
being in this room, certified to that. It seemed to her while she was
waiting for the carriage he had ordered that she was already half a
wife. She was not conscious of a blush. The sprite in the young woman's
mind whispered of fire not burning when one is in the heart of it. And
undoubtedly, contemplated from the outside, this room was the heart
of fire. An impulse to fall on Alvan's breast and bless him for his
chivalrousness had to be kept unde