In this manner her natural effervescence amused her sorrowful mind while gazing from her chamber window at the mountain sides across the valley, where tourists, in the autumnal season, sweep up and down like a tidal river.  She had ceased to weep; she had outwept the colour of her eyes and the consolation of weeping.  Dressed in black to the throat, she sat and waited the arrival of her phantom friend, the baroness—­that angel! who proved her goodness in consenting to be the friend of Alvan’s beloved, because she was the true friend of Alvan!  How cheap such a way of proving goodness, Clotilde did not consider.  She wanted it so.

The mountain heights were in dusty sunlight.  She had seen them day after day thinly lined on the dead sky, inviting thunder and doomed to sultriness.  She looked on the garden of the house, a desert under bee and butterfly.  Looking beyond the garden she perceived her father on the glaring road, and one with him, the sight of whom did not flush her cheek or spring her heart to a throb, though she pitied the poor boy:  he was useless to her, utterly.

Soon her Indian Bacchus was in her room, and alone with her, and at her feet.  Her father had given him hope.  He came bearing eyes that were like hope’s own; and kneeling, kissing her hands, her knees, her hair, he seemed unaware that she was inanimate.

There was nothing imaginable in which he could be of use.

He was only another dust-cloud of the sultry sameness.  She had been expecting a woman, a tempest choral with sky and mountain and valley-hollows, as the overture to Alvan’s appearance.

But he roused her.  With Marko she had never felt her cowardice, and his passionately beseeching, trembling, ‘Will you have me?’ called up the tiger in the girl; in spite of pity for his voice she retorted on her parents: 

’Will I have you?  I?  You ask me what is my will?  It sounds oddly from you, seeing that I wrote to you in Lucerne what I would have, and nothing has changed in me since then, nothing!  My feeling for him is unaltered, and everything you have heard of me was wrung out of me by my unhappiness.  The world is dead to me, and all in it that is not.  Sigismund Alvan.  To you I am accustomed to speak every thought of my soul, and I tell you the world and all it has is dead to me, even my parents—­I hate them.’

Marko pressed her hands.  If he loved her slavishly, it was generously.  The wild thing he said was one of the frantic leaps of generosity in a heart that was gone to impulse:  ’I see it, they have martyrized you.  I know you so well, Clotilde!  So, then, come to me, come with me, let me cherish you.  I will take you and rescue you from your people, and should it be your positive wish to meet Alvan again, I myself will take you to him, and then you may choose between us.’

The generosity was evident.  There was nevertheless, to a young woman realizing the position foreshadowed by such a project, the suspicion of a slavish hope nestling among the circumstances in the background, and this she was taught by the dangerous emotion of gratitude gaining on her, and melting her to him.