On the morning after the information of Alvan’s return, her father, who deserved credit as a tactician, came to her to say that Alvan had sent to demand his letters and presents.  The demand was unlike what her stunned heart recollected of Alvan; but a hint that the baroness was behind it, and that a refusal would bring the baroness down on her with another piece of insolence, was effective.  She dealt out the letters, arranged the presents, made up the books, pamphlets, trinkets, amulet coins, lock of black hair, and worn post-marked paper addressed in his hand to Clotilde von Rudiger, carefully; and half as souvenir, half with the forlorn yearning of the look of lovers when they break asunder—­or of one of them—­she signed inside the packet not ‘Clotilde,’ but the gentlest title he had bestowed on her, trusting to the pathos of the word ‘child’ to tell him that she was enforced and still true, if he should be interested in knowing it.  Weak souls are much moved by having the pathos on their side.  They are consoled too.

Time passed, whole days:  the tender reminder had no effect on him!  It had been her last appeal:  she reflected that she had really felt when he had not been feeling at all:  and this marks a division.

She was next requested to write a letter to Alvan, signifying his release by the notification of her engagement to Prince Marko.  She was personally to deliver it to a gentleman who was of neither party, and who would give her a letter from Alvan in exchange, which, while assuring the gentleman she was acting with perfect freedom, she was to be under her oath not to read, and dutifully to hand to Marko, her betrothed.  Her father assumed the fact of her renewed engagement to the prince, as her whole family did; strangely, she thought:  it struck her as a fatality.  He said that Alvan was working him great mischief, doing him deadly injury in his position, and for no just reason, inasmuch as he—­a bold, bad man striving to ruin the family on a point of pride—­had declared that he simply considered himself bound in honour to her, only a little doubtful of her independent action at present; and a release of him, accompanied by her plain statement of her being under no compulsion, voluntarily the betrothed of another, would solve the difficulty.  A certain old woman, it seemed, was anxious to have him formally released.

With the usual dose for such a patient, of cajoleries and threats, the General begged her to comply, pulling the hands he squeezed in a way to strongly emphasize his affectionate entreaty.

She went straight to Marko, consenting that he should have Alvan’s letter unopened (she cared not to read it, she said), on his promise to give it up to her within a stated period.  There was a kind of prohibited pleasure, sweet acid, catching discord, in the idea of this lover’s keeping the forbidden thing she could ask for when she was curious about the other, which at present she was not; dead rather;