her a free course, and she, that abject whom you beheld recently renouncing me, is, you will see, the young Aurora she was when she came striking at my door on the upper Alp.  That was a morning!  That morning is Clotilde till my eyes turn over!  She is all young heaven and the mountains for me!  She’s the filmy light above the mountains that weds white snow and sky.  By the way, I dreamt last night she was half a woman, half a tree, and her hair was like a dead yewbough, which is as you know of a brown burnt-out colour, suitable to the popular conception of widows.  She stood, and whatever turning you took, you struck back on her.  Whether my widow, I can’t say:  she must first be my wife.  Oh, for tomorrow!’

‘What sort of evening is it?’ said the baroness.

‘A Mont Blanc evening:  I saw him as I came along,’ Alvan replied, and seized his hat to be out to look on the sovereign mountain again.  They touched hands.  He promised to call in the forenoon next day.

‘Be cool,’ she counselled him.

‘Oh!’ He flung back his head, making light of the crisis.  ’After all, it’s only a girl.  But, you know, what I set myself to win! . . .  The thing’s too small—­I have been at such pains about it that I should be ridiculous if I allowed myself to be beaten.  There is no other reason for the trouble we ’re at, except that, as I have said a thousand times, she suits me.  No man can be cooler than I.’

‘Keep so,’ said the baroness.

He walked to where the strenuous blue lake, finding outlet, propels a shoulder, like a bright-muscled athlete in action, and makes the Rhone-stream.  There he stood for an hour, disfevered by the limpid liquid tumult, inspirited by the glancing volumes of a force that knows no abatement, and is the skiey Alps behind, the great historic citied plains ahead.

His meditation ended with a resolution half in the form of a prayer (to mixed deities undefined) never to ask for a small thing any more if this one were granted him!

He had won it, of course, having brought all his powers to bear on the task; and he rejoiced in winning it:  his heart leapt, his imagination spun radiant webs of colour:  but he was a little ashamed of his frenzies, though he did not distinctly recall them; he fancied he had made some noise, loud or not, because his intentions were so pure that it was infamous to thwart them.  At a certain age honest men made sacrifice of their liberty to society, and he had been ready to perform the duty of husbanding a woman.  A man should have a wife and rear children, not to be forgotten in the land, and to help mankind by transmitting to future times qualities he has proved priceless:  he thought of the children, and yearned to the generations of men physically and morally through them.

This was his apology to the world for his distantly-recollected excesses of temper.