sudden burst of his wrath. He knew the proper physic. 'You girls
want the lesson we read to skittish recruits; you shall have it. Write:
"He is now as nothing to me." You shall write that you hate him, if you
hesitate! Why, you unreasonable slut, you have given him up; you have
told him you have given him up, and what objection can you have to
telling others now you have done it?'

'I was forced to it, body and soul!' cried Clotilde, sobbing and
bursting into desperation out of a weak show of petulance that she had
put on to propitiate him. 'If I have to tell, I will tell how it was.
For that my heart is unchanged, and Alvan is, and will be, my lord, all
the world may see. I would rather write that I hate him.'

'You write, the man is now as nothing to me!' said her father, dashing
his finger in a fiery zig-zag along the line for her pen to follow. 'Or
else, my girl, you've been playing us a pretty farce!' He strung himself
for a mad gallop of wrath, gave her a shudder, and relapsed. 'No, no,
you're wiser, you're a better girl than that. Write it. I must have it
written-here, come! The worst is over; the rest is child's play. Come,
take the pen, I'll guide your hand.'

The pen was fixed in her hand, and the first words formed. They looked
such sprawling skeletons that Clotilde had the comfort of feeling sure
they would be discerned as the work of compulsion. So she wrote on
mechanically, solacing herself for what she did with vows of future
revolt. Alvan had a saying, that want of courage is want of sense; and
she remembered his illustration of how sense would nourish courage by
scattering the fear of death, if we would only grasp the thought that we
sink to oblivion gladly at night, and, most of us, quit it reluctantly
in the morning. She shut her eyes while writing; she fancied death would
be welcome; and as she certainly had sense, she took it for the promise
of courage. She flattered herself by believing, therefore, that she who
did not object to die was only awaiting the cruelly-delayed advent of
her lover to be almost as brave as he--the feminine of him. With these
ideas in her head much clearer than when she wrote the couple of
lines to Alvan--for then her head was reeling, she was then beaten and
prostrate--she signed her name to a second renunciation of him, and was
aware of a flush of self-reproach at the simple suspicion of his being
deceived by it; it was an insult to his understanding. Full surely the
pr