r from the baroness!

On the morning after the information of Alvan's return, her father, who
deserved credit as a tactician, came to her to say that Alvan had sent
to demand his letters and presents. The demand was unlike what her
stunned heart recollected of Alvan; but a hint that the baroness was
behind it, and that a refusal would bring the baroness down on her with
another piece of insolence, was effective. She dealt out the letters,
arranged the presents, made up the books, pamphlets, trinkets, amulet
coins, lock of black hair, and worn post-marked paper addressed in his
hand to Clotilde von Rudiger, carefully; and half as souvenir, half with
the forlorn yearning of the look of lovers when they break asunder--or
of one of them--she signed inside the packet not 'Clotilde,' but the
gentlest title he had bestowed on her, trusting to the pathos of the
word 'child' to tell him that she was enforced and still true, if he
should be interested in knowing it. Weak souls are much moved by having
the pathos on their side. They are consoled too.

Time passed, whole days: the tender reminder had no effect on him! It
had been her last appeal: she reflected that she had really felt when he
had not been feeling at all: and this marks a division.

She was next requested to write a letter to Alvan, signifying his
release by the notification of her engagement to Prince Marko. She was
personally to deliver it to a gentleman who was of neither party,
and who would give her a letter from Alvan in exchange, which, while
assuring the gentleman she was acting with perfect freedom, she was
to be under her oath not to read, and dutifully to hand to Marko, her
betrothed. Her father assumed the fact of her renewed engagement to the
prince, as her whole family did; strangely, she thought: it struck her
as a fatality. He said that Alvan was working him great mischief, doing
him deadly injury in his position, and for no just reason, inasmuch as
he--a bold, bad man striving to ruin the family on a point of pride--had
declared that he simply considered himself bound in honour to her, only
a little doubtful of her independent action at present; and a release
of him, accompanied by her plain statement of her being under no
compulsion, voluntarily the betrothed of another, would solve the
difficulty. A certain old woman, it seemed, was anxious to have him
formally released.

With the usual dose for such a patient, of cajoleries and threats, the
G