She had forgotten her signature to the letter to the professor when his answer arrived.  The sight of the handwriting of one of her lover’s faithfullest friends was like a peal of bells to her, and she tore the letter open, and began to blink and spell at a strange language, taking the frosty sentences piecemeal.  He begged her to be firm in her resolution, give up Alvan and obey her parents!  This man of high intelligence and cultivation wrote like a provincial schoolmistress moralizing.  Though he knew the depth of her passion for Alvan, and had within the month received her lark-song of her betrothal, he, this man—­ if living man he could be thought—­counselled her to endeavour to deserve the love and respect of her parents, alluded to Alvan’s age and her better birth, approved her resolve to consult the wishes of her family, and in fine was as rank a traitor to friendship as any chronicled.  Out on him!  She swept him from earth.

And she had built some of her hopes on the professor.  ‘False friend!’ she cried.

She wept over Alvan for having had so false a friend.

There remained no one that could be expected to intervene with a strong arm save the baroness.  The professor’s emphasized approval of her resolve to consult the wishes of her family was a shocking hypocrisy, and Clotilde thought of the contrast to it in her letter to the baroness.  The tripping and stumbling, prettily awkward little tone of gosling innocent new from its egg, throughout the letter, was a triumph of candour.  She repeated passages, paragraphs, of the letter, assuring herself that such affectionately reverential prattle would have moved her, and with the strongest desire to cast her arms about the writer:  it had been composed to be moving to a woman, to any woman.  The old woman was entreated to bestow her blessing on the young one, all in Arcadia, and let the young one nestle to the bosom she had not an idea of robbing.  She could not have had the idea, else how could she have made the petition?  And in order to compliment a venerable dame on her pure friendship for a gentleman, it was imperative to reject the idea.  Besides, after seeing the photograph of the baroness, common civility insisted on the purity of her friendship.  Nay, in mercy to the poor gentleman, friendship it must be.

A letter of reply from that noble lady was due.  Possibly she had determined not to write, but to act.  She was a lady of exalted birth, a lady of the upper aristocracy, who could, if she would, bring both a social and official pressure upon the General:  and it might be in motion now behind the scenes, Clotilde laid hold of her phantom baroness, almost happy under the phantom’s whisper that she need not despair.  ’You have been a little weak,’ the phantom said to her, and she acquiesced with a soft sniffle, adding:  ’But, dearest, honoured lady, you are a woman, and know what our trials are when we are so persecuted.