ce, he brought her old throning
self back to her, and he was handsome and tame as a leopard-skin at her
feet.

If she was doomed to reach to Alvan through him, at least she had warned
him. The vision of the truthfulness of her nature threw a celestial wan
beam on her guilty destiny.

She patted his head and bade him leave her, narrowing her shoulders on
the breast to let it be seen that the dark household within was locked
and shuttered.

He went. He was good, obedient, humane; he was generous, exquisitely
bred; he brought her peace, and he had been warned. It is difficult in
affliction to think of one who belongs to us as one to whom we owe
a duty. The unquestionably sincere and devoted lover is also in his
candour a featureless person; and though we would not punish him for his
goodness, we have the right to anticipate that it will be equal to
every trial. Perhaps, for the sake of peace... after warning him... her
meditations tottered in dots.

But when the heart hungers behind such meditations, that thinking
without language is a dangerous habit; for there will suddenly come a
dash usurping the series of tentative dots, which is nothing other than
the dreadful thing resolved on, as of necessity, as naturally as the
adventurous bow-legged infant pitches back from an excursion of two
paces to mother's lap; and not much less innocently within the mind, it
would appear. The dash is a haven reached that would not be greeted
if it stood out in words. Could we live without ourselves letting our
animal do our thinking for us legibly? We live with ourselves agreeably
so long as his projects are phrased in his primitive tongue, even though
we have clearly apprehended what he means, and though we sufficiently
well understand the whither of our destination under his guidance. No
counsel can be saner than that the heart should be bidden to speak
out in plain verbal speech within us. For want of it, Clotilde's short
explorations in Dot-and-Dash land were of a kind to terrify her, and yet
they seemed not only unavoidable, but foreshadowing of the unavoidable
to come. Or possibly--the thought came to her--Alvan would keep his
word, and save her from worse by stepping to the altar between her
and Marko, there calling on her to decide and quit the prince; and his
presence would breathe courage into her to go to him. It set her looking
to the altar as a prospect of deliverance.

Her mother could not fail to notice a change in Clo