The old woman
was entreated to bestow her blessing on the young one, all in Arcadia,
and let the young one nestle to the bosom she had not an idea of
robbing. She could not have had the idea, else how could she have made
the petition? And in order to compliment a venerable dame on her pure
friendship for a gentleman, it was imperative to reject the idea.
Besides, after seeing the photograph of the baroness, common civility
insisted on the purity of her friendship. Nay, in mercy to the poor
gentleman, friendship it must be.

A letter of reply from that noble lady was due. Possibly she had
determined not to write, but to act. She was a lady of exalted birth,
a lady of the upper aristocracy, who could, if she would, bring both a
social and official pressure upon the General: and it might be in motion
now behind the scenes, Clotilde laid hold of her phantom baroness,
almost happy under the phantom's whisper that she need not despair. 'You
have been a little weak,' the phantom said to her, and she acquiesced
with a soft sniffle, adding: 'But, dearest, honoured lady, you are a
woman, and know what our trials are when we are so persecuted. O that
I had your beautiful sedateness! I do admire it, madam. I wish I could
imitate.' She carried her dramatic ingenuousness farthel still by
saying: 'I have seen your photograph'; implying that the inimitable, the
much coveted air of composure breathed out of yonder presentment of her
features. 'For I can't call you good looking,' she said within herself,
for the satisfaction of her sense of candour, of her sense of contrast
as well. And shutting her eyes, she thought of the horrid penitent a
harsh-faced woman in confession must be:

The picture sent her swimmingly to the confessional, where sat a man
with his head in a hood, and he soon heard enough of mixed substance to
dash his hood, almost his head, off. Beauty may be immoderately frank in
soul to the ghostly. The black page comprised a very long list. 'But
put this on the white page,' says she to the surging father inside his
box--'I loved Alvan!' A sentence or two more fetches the Alvanic man
jumping out of the priest: and so closely does she realize it that she
has to hunt herself into a corner with the question, whether she shall
tell him she guessed him to be no other than her lover. 'How could you
expect a girl, who is not a Papist, to come kneeling here?' she says.
And he answers with no matter what of a gallant kind.

In t