his manner her natural effervescence amused her sorrowful mind while
gazing from her chamber window at the mountain sides across the valley,
where tourists, in the autumnal season, sweep up and down like a tidal
river. She had ceased to weep; she had outwept the colour of her eyes
and the consolation of weeping. Dressed in black to the throat, she sat
and waited the arrival of her phantom friend, the baroness--that angel!
who proved her goodness in consenting to be the friend of Alvan's
beloved, because she was the true friend of Alvan! How cheap such a way
of proving goodness, Clotilde did not consider. She wanted it so.

The mountain heights were in dusty sunlight. She had seen them day
after day thinly lined on the dead sky, inviting thunder and doomed to
sultriness. She looked on the garden of the house, a desert under bee
and butterfly. Looking beyond the garden she perceived her father on
the glaring road, and one with him, the sight of whom did not flush her
cheek or spring her heart to a throb, though she pitied the poor boy: he
was useless to her, utterly.

Soon her Indian Bacchus was in her room, and alone with her, and at her
feet. Her father had given him hope. He came bearing eyes that were like
hope's own; and kneeling, kissing her hands, her knees, her hair, he
seemed unaware that she was inanimate.

There was nothing imaginable in which he could be of use.

He was only another dust-cloud of the sultry sameness. She had
been expecting a woman, a tempest choral with sky and mountain and
valley-hollows, as the overture to Alvan's appearance.

But he roused her. With Marko she had never felt her cowardice, and his
passionately beseeching, trembling, 'Will you have me?' called up the
tiger in the girl; in spite of pity for his voice she retorted on her
parents:

'Will I have you? I? You ask me what is my will? It sounds oddly from
you, seeing that I wrote to you in Lucerne what I would have, and
nothing has changed in me since then, nothing! My feeling for him is
unaltered, and everything you have heard of me was wrung out of me by
my unhappiness. The world is dead to me, and all in it that is not.
Sigismund Alvan. To you I am accustomed to speak every thought of my
soul, and I tell you the world and all it has is dead to me, even my
parents--I hate them.'

Marko pressed her hands. If he loved her slavishly, it was generously.
The wild thing he said was one of the frantic leaps of generosity in a
hear