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.

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.