The look was the truth revealed-her soul.  It begged for life like an infant; and the man’s face was an iron rock in reply!  No wonder—­he worshipped the baroness!  So great was Clotilde’s hatred of him that it overflooded the image of Alvan, who called him friend, and deputed him to act as friend.  Such blindness, weakness, folly, on the part of one of Alvan’s pretensions, incurred a shade of her contempt.  She had not ever thought of him coldly:  hitherto it would have seemed a sacrilege; but now she said definitely, the friend of Tresten cannot be the man I supposed him! and she ascribed her capacity for saying it, and for perceiving and adding up Alvan’s faults of character, to the freezing she had taken from that most antipathetic person.  She confessed to sensations of spite which would cause her to reject and spurn even his pleadings for Alvan, if they were imaginable as actual.  Their not being imaginable allowed her to indulge her naughtiness harmlessly, for the gratification of the idea of wounding some one, though it were her lover, connected with this Tresten.

The letter of the baroness and the visit of the woman’s admirer had vitiated Clotilde’s blood.  She was not only not mistress of her thoughts, she was undirected either in thinking or wishing by any desires, except that the people about her should caress and warm her, until, with no gaze backward, she could say good-bye to them, full of meaning as a good-bye to the covered grave, as unreluctantly as the swallow quits her eaves-nest in autumn:  and they were to learn that they were chargeable with the sequel of the history.  There would be a sequel, she was sure, if it came only to punish them for the cruelty which thwarted her timid anticipation of it by pressing on her natural instinct at all costs to bargain for an escape from pain, and making her simulate contentment to cheat her muffled wound and them.

CHAPTER XIII

His love meantime was the mission and the burden of Alvan, and he was not ashamed to speak of it and plead for it; and the pleading was not done troubadourishly, in soft flute-notes, as for easement of tuneful emotions beseeching sympathy.  He was liker to a sturdy beggar demanding his crust, to support life, of corporations that can be talked into admitting the rights of man; and he vollied close logical argumentation, on the basis of the laws, in defence of his most natural hunger, thunder in his breast and bright new heavenly morning alternating or clashing while the electric wires and post smote him with evil tidings of Clotilde, and the success of his efforts caught her back to him.  Daily many times he reached to her and lost her, had her in his arms and his arms withered with emptiness.  The ground he won quaked under him.  All the evidence opposed it, but he was in action, and his reason swore that he had her fast.  He had seen and felt his power over her; his reason told