Abuse of a lover is ordinarily retorted on in the lady’s heart by the brighter perception of his merits; but when the heart is weak, the creature suffering shame, her lover the cause of it, and seeming cruel, she is likely to lose all perception and bend like a flower pelted.  Her cry to him:  ‘If you had been wiser, this would not have been!’ will sink to the inward meditation:  ’If he had been truer!’—­and though she does not necessarily think him untrue for charging him with it, there is already a loosening of the bonds where the accusation has begun.  They are not broken because they are loosened:  still the loosening of them makes it possible to cut them with less of a snap and less pain.

Alvan had relinquished her he loved to brave the tempest in a frail small boat, and he certainly could not have apprehended the furious outbreak she was exposed to.  She might so far have exonerated him had she been able to reflect; but she whom he had forced to depend on him in blind reliance, now opened her eyes on an opposite power exercising material rigours.  After having enjoyed extraordinary independence for a young woman, she was treated as a refractory child, literally marched through the streets in the custody of her father, who clutched her by the hair-Alvan’s beloved golden locks!—­and held her under terror of a huge forester’s weapon, that he had seized at the first tidings of his daughter’s flight to the Jew.  He seemed to have a grim indifference to exposure; contempt, with a sense of the humour of it:  and this was a satisfaction to him, founded on his practical observance of two or three maxims quite equal to the fullest knowledge of women for rightly managing them:  preferable, inasmuch as they are simpler, and, by merely cracking a whip, bring her back to the post, instead of wasting time by hunting her as she likes to run.  Police were round his house.  The General chattered and shouted of the desperate lawlessness and larcenies of that Jew—­the things that Jew would attempt.  He dragged her indoors, muttering of his policy in treating her at last to a wholesome despotism.

This was the medicine for her—­he knew her!  Whether he did or not, he knew the potency of his physic.  He knew that osiers can be made to bend.  With a frightful noise of hammering, he himself nailed up the window-shutters of the room she was locked in hard and fast, and he left her there and roared across the household that any one holding communication with the prisoner should be shot like a dog.  This was a manifestation of power in a form more convincing than the orator’s.

She was friendless, abused, degraded, benighted in broad daylight; abandoned by her lover.  She sank on the floor of the room, conceiving with much strangeness of sentiment under these hard stripes of misfortune, that reality had come.  The monster had hold of her.  She was isolated, fed like a dungeoned captive.  She had nothing but our natural obstinacy to hug, or seem to do so when wearifulness