’You that offered yourself in flight to him who once proposed it, he had the choice of you and he abjured you.  He has cast you off!’

She phrased it in speech to herself.  It was incredible, but it was clear:  he had gone.

The room was vacant; the room was black and silent as a dungeon.

’He will not have you:  he has handed you back to them the more readily to renounce you.’

She framed the words half aloud in a moan as she glanced at her mother heaving in stern triumph, her sister drooping, Madame Emerly standing at the window.

The craven’s first instinct for safety, quick as the cavern lynx for light, set her on the idea that she was abandoned:  it whispered of quietness if she submitted.

And thus she reasoned:  Had Alvan taken her, she would not have been guilty of more than a common piece of love-desperation in running to him, the which may be love’s glory when marriage crowns it.  By his rejecting her and leaving her, he rendered her not only a runaway, but a castaway.  It was not natural that he should leave her; ’not natural in him to act his recent part; but he had done it; consequently she was at the mercy of those who might pick her up.  She was, in her humiliation and dread, all of the moment, she could see to no distance; and judging of him, feeling for herself, within that contracted circle of sensation—­sure, from her knowledge of her cowardice, that he had done unwisely—­she became swayed about like a castaway in soul, until her distinguishing of his mad recklessness in the challenge of a power greater than his own grew present with her as his personal cruelty to the woman who had flung off everything, flung herself on the tempestuous deeps, on his behalf.  And here she was, left to float or founder!  Alvan had gone.  The man rageing over the room, abusing her ’infamous lover, the dirty Jew, the notorious thief, scoundrel, gallowsbird,’ etc., etc., frightful epithets, not to be transcribed—­was her father.  He had come, she knew not how.  Alvan had tossed her to him.

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.