had
she been able to reflect; but she whom he had forced to depend on him
in blind reliance, now opened her eyes on an opposite power exercising
material rigours. After having enjoyed extraordinary independence for
a young woman, she was treated as a refractory child, literally marched
through the streets in the custody of her father, who clutched her by
the hair-Alvan's beloved golden locks!--and held her under terror of a
huge forester's weapon, that he had seized at the first tidings of his
daughter's flight to the Jew. He seemed to have a grim indifference to
exposure; contempt, with a sense of the humour of it: and this was a
satisfaction to him, founded on his practical observance of two or
three maxims quite equal to the fullest knowledge of women for rightly
managing them: preferable, inasmuch as they are simpler, and, by merely
cracking a whip, bring her back to the post, instead of wasting time
by hunting her as she likes to run. Police were round his house. The
General chattered and shouted of the desperate lawlessness and larcenies
of that Jew--the things that Jew would attempt. He dragged her
indoors, muttering of his policy in treating her at last to a wholesome
despotism.

This was the medicine for her--he knew her! Whether he did or not, he
knew the potency of his physic. He knew that osiers can be made to
bend. With a frightful noise of hammering, he himself nailed up the
window-shutters of the room she was locked in hard and fast, and he
left her there and roared across the household that any one holding
communication with the prisoner should be shot like a dog. This was a
manifestation of power in a form more convincing than the orator's.

She was friendless, abused, degraded, benighted in broad daylight;
abandoned by her lover. She sank on the floor of the room, conceiving
with much strangeness of sentiment under these hard stripes of
misfortune, that reality had come. The monster had hold of her. She was
isolated, fed like a dungeoned captive. She had nothing but our natural
obstinacy to hug, or seem to do so when wearifulness reduced her to
cling to the semblance of it only. 'I marry Alvan!' was her iterated
answer to her father, on his visits to see whether he had yet broken
her; and she spoke with the desperate firmness of weak creatures that
strive to nail themselves to the sound of it. He listened and named his
time for returning. The tug between rigour and endurance continued for
about fort