ea of wounding some one, though it were her
lover, connected with this Tresten.

The letter of the baroness and the visit of the woman's admirer
had vitiated Clotilde's blood. She was not only not mistress of her
thoughts, she was undirected either in thinking or wishing by any
desires, except that the people about her should caress and warm her,
until, with no gaze backward, she could say good-bye to them, full of
meaning as a good-bye to the covered grave, as unreluctantly as the
swallow quits her eaves-nest in autumn: and they were to learn that they
were chargeable with the sequel of the history. There would be a sequel,
she was sure, if it came only to punish them for the cruelty which
thwarted her timid anticipation of it by pressing on her natural
instinct at all costs to bargain for an escape from pain, and making her
simulate contentment to cheat her muffled wound and them.

CHAPTER XIII

His love meantime was the mission and the burden of Alvan, and he was
not ashamed to speak of it and plead for it; and the pleading was not
done troubadourishly, in soft flute-notes, as for easement of tuneful
emotions beseeching sympathy. He was liker to a sturdy beggar demanding
his crust, to support life, of corporations that can be talked into
admitting the rights of man; and he vollied close logical argumentation,
on the basis of the laws, in defence of his most natural hunger, thunder
in his breast and bright new heavenly morning alternating or clashing
while the electric wires and post smote him with evil tidings of
Clotilde, and the success of his efforts caught her back to him. Daily
many times he reached to her and lost her, had her in his arms and his
arms withered with emptiness. The ground he won quaked under him. All
the evidence opposed it, but he was in action, and his reason swore that
he had her fast. He had seen and felt his power over her; his reason
told him by what had been that it must be. Could he doubt? He battled
for his reason. Doubt was an extinguishing wave, and he clung to his
book of the Law, besieging Church and State with it, pointing to texts
of the law which proved her free to choose her lord and husband for
herself, expressing his passionate love by his precise interpretation of
the law: and still with the cold sentience gaining on him, against the
current of his tumultuous blood and his hurried intelligence, of
her being actually what he had named her in moments of playful
vision--