'To-morrow, then! The worst of omens is delay.'

Clotilde faintly gasped. Could he mean it?--he of so evil a name in her
family and circle!

Her playfulness and pleasure in the game of courtliness forsook her.

'Tell me the hour when it will be most convenient to them to receive
me,' said Alvan.

She stopped walking in sheer fright.

'My father--my mother?' she said, imaging within her the varied horror
of each and the commotion.

'To-morrow or the day after--not later. No delays! You are mine, we are
one; and the sooner my cause is pleaded the better for us both. If
I could step in and see them this instant, it would be forestalling
mischances. Do you not see, that time is due to us, and the minutes are
our gold slipping away?'

She shrank her hand back: she did not wish to withdraw the hand, only
to shun the pledge it signified. He opened an abyss at her feet, and in
deadly alarm of him she exclaimed: 'Oh! not yet; not immediately.' She
trembled, she made her petition dismal by her anguish of speechlessness.
'There will be such... not yet! Perhaps later. They must not be troubled
yet--at present. I am... I cannot--pray, delay!'

'But you are mine!' said Alvan. 'You feel it as I do. There can be no
real impediment?'

She gave an empty sigh that sought to be a run of entreaties. In fear
of his tongue she caught at words to baffle it, senseless of their
imbecility: 'Do not insist: yes, in time: they will--they--they may.
My father is not very well... my mother: she is not very well. They are
neither of them very well: not at present!--Spare them at present.'

To avoid being carried away, she flung herself from the centaur's back
to the disenchanting earth; she separated herself from him in spirit,
and beheld him as her father and mother and her circle would look on
this pretender to her hand, with his lordly air, his Jew blood, and his
hissing reputation--for it was a reputation that stirred the snakes and
the geese of the world. She saw him in their eyes, quite coldly: which
imaginative capacity was one of the remarkable feats of cowardice,
active and cold of brain even while the heart is active and would be
warm.

He read something of her weakness. 'And supposing I decide that it must
be?'

'How can I supplicate you!' she replied with a shiver, feeling that she
had lost her chance of slipping from his grasp, as trained women of
the world, or very sprightly young wits know how to do at the critical
mome