‘Practical as the head of a State department,’ said he, in good faith.

‘I shall not keep you waiting,’ she resumed.

’The sooner we are together after the action opens the better for our success, my golden crest!’

’Have no misgivings, Sigismund.  You have transformed me.  A spark of you is in my blood.  Come.  I shall send word to your hotel when you are to appear.  But you will come, you will be there, I know.  I know you so entirely.’

’As a rule, Lutetia, women know no more than half of a man even when they have married him.  At least you ought to know me.  You know that if I were to exercise my will firmly now—­it would not waver if I called it forth—­I could carry you off and spare you the flutter you will have to go through during our interlude with papa and mama.’

‘I almost wish you would,’ said she.  She looked half imploringly, biting her lip to correct the peeping wish.

Alvan pressed a finger on one of her dimples:  ’Be brave.  Flight and defiance are our last resource.  Now that I see you resolved I shun the scandal, and we will leave it to them to insist on it, if it must be.  How can you be less than resolved after I have poured my influence into your veins?  The other day on the heights—­had you consented then?  Well! it would have been very well, but not so well.  We two have a future, and are bound to make the opening chapters good sober reading, for an example, if we can.  I take you from your father’s house, from your mother’s arms, from the “God speed” of your friends.  That is how Alvan’s wife should be presented to the world.’

Clotilde’s epistle to the baroness was composed, approved, and despatched.  To a frigid eye it read as more hypocritical than it really was; for supposing it had to be written, the language of the natural impulse called up to write it was necessarily in request, and that language is easily overdone, so as to be discordant with the situation, while it is, as the writer feels, a fairly true and well-formed expression of the pretty impulse.  But wiser is it always that the star in the ascendant should not address the one waning.  Hardly can a word be uttered without grossly wounding.  She would not do it to a younger rival:  the letter strikes on the recipient’s age!  She babbles of a friendship:  she plays at childish ninny!  The display of her ingenuous happiness causes feminine nature’s bosom to rise in surges.  The declarations of her devotedness to the man waken comparisons with a deeper, a longer-tried suffering.  Actually the letter of the rising star assumes personal feeling to have died out of the abandoned luminary, and personal feeling is chafed to its acutest edge by the perusal; contempt also of one who can stupidly simulate such innocence, is roused.