appeared impossible; the picture of her was not human, and she gave out a negative of her whole frame convulsed, whereat the General was not slow to remind her of the scourgings she had undergone by a sudden burst of his wrath.  He knew the proper physic.  ’You girls want the lesson we read to skittish recruits; you shall have it.  Write:  “He is now as nothing to me.”  You shall write that you hate him, if you hesitate!  Why, you unreasonable slut, you have given him up; you have told him you have given him up, and what objection can you have to telling others now you have done it?’

‘I was forced to it, body and soul!’ cried Clotilde, sobbing and bursting into desperation out of a weak show of petulance that she had put on to propitiate him.  ’If I have to tell, I will tell how it was.  For that my heart is unchanged, and Alvan is, and will be, my lord, all the world may see.  I would rather write that I hate him.’

‘You write, the man is now as nothing to me!’ said her father, dashing his finger in a fiery zig-zag along the line for her pen to follow.  ’Or else, my girl, you’ve been playing us a pretty farce!’ He strung himself for a mad gallop of wrath, gave her a shudder, and relapsed.  ’No, no, you’re wiser, you’re a better girl than that.  Write it.  I must have it written-here, come!  The worst is over; the rest is child’s play.  Come, take the pen, I’ll guide your hand.’

The pen was fixed in her hand, and the first words formed.  They looked such sprawling skeletons that Clotilde had the comfort of feeling sure they would be discerned as the work of compulsion.  So she wrote on mechanically, solacing herself for what she did with vows of future revolt.  Alvan had a saying, that want of courage is want of sense; and she remembered his illustration of how sense would nourish courage by scattering the fear of death, if we would only grasp the thought that we sink to oblivion gladly at night, and, most of us, quit it reluctantly in the morning.  She shut her eyes while writing; she fancied death would be welcome; and as she certainly had sense, she took it for the promise of courage.  She flattered herself by believing, therefore, that she who did not object to die was only awaiting the cruelly-delayed advent of her lover to be almost as brave as he—­the feminine of him.  With these ideas in her head much clearer than when she wrote the couple of lines to Alvan—­for then her head was reeling, she was then beaten and prostrate—­ she signed her name to a second renunciation of him, and was aware of a flush of self-reproach at the simple suspicion of his being deceived by it; it was an insult to his understanding.  Full surely the professor would not be deceived, and a lover with a heart to reach to her and read her could never be hoodwinked by so palpable a piece of slavishness.  She was indeed slavish; the apology necessitated the confession.  But that promise of courage, coming of her ownership of sense, vindicated her prospectively; she had so little of it that she embraced it as a present possession, and she made it Alvan’s task to put it to the trial.  Hence it became Alvan’s offence if, owing to his absence, she could be charged with behaving badly.  Her generosity pardoned him his inexplicable delay to appear in his might:  ‘But see what your continued delay causes!’ she said, and her tone was merely sorrowful.