was a manfully generous view of the
situation. It belongs to the robustness of the conqueror's mood. But how
of his opinion of her character in the fret of a baffling, a repulse, a
defeat? Supposing the circumstances not to have helped her to shine as a
heroine, while he was reduced to appear no hero to himself! Wise are the
mothers who keep vigilant personal watch over their girls, were it only
to guard them at present, from the gentleman's condescending generosity,
until he has become something more than robust in his ideas of the
sex--say, for lack of the ringing word, fraternal.

Clotilde never knew, and Alvan would have been unable to date, the
origin of the black thing flung at her in time to come--when the man
was frenzied, doubtless, but it was in his mind, and more than froth of
madness.

After the night of the ball they met beneath the sanctioning roof of
the amiable professor; and on one occasion the latter, perhaps waxing
anxious, and after bringing about the introduction of Clotilde to the
sister of Alvan, pursued his prudent measures bypassing the pair through
a demi-ceremony of betrothal. It sprang Clotilde astride nearer to
reality, both actually and in feeling; and she began to show the change
at home. A rebuff that came of the coupling of her name with Alvan's
pushed her back as far below the surface as she had ever been. She
waited for him to take the step she had again implored him not yet to
take; she feared that he would, she marvelled at his abstaining; the
old wheel revolved, as it ever does with creatures that wait for
circumstances to bring the change they cannot work for themselves; and
once more the two fell asunder. She had thoughts of the cloister. Her
venerable relative died joining her hand to Prince Marko's; she was
induced to think of marriage. An illness laid her prostrate; she
contemplated the peace of death.

Shortly before she fell sick the prince was a guest of her father's,
and had won the household by his perfect amiability as an associate. The
grace and glow, and some of the imaginable accomplishments of an Indian
Bacchus were native to him. In her convalescence, she asked herself what
more she could crave than the worship of a godlike youth, whom she in
return might cherish, strengthening his frail health with happiness. For
she had seen how suffering ate him up; he required no teaching in the
Spartan virtue of suffering, wolf-gnawed, silently. But he was a flower
in sunshin