owning it to be not unfavourable. Her worthy relatives, the Frau v.
Crestow and husband, had very properly furnished a report to the family
of the memorable evening; and the hubbub over it, with the epithets
applied to Alvan, intimated how he would have been received on a visit
to demand her in marriage. There was no chance of her being allowed to
enter houses where this 'rageing demagogue and popular buffoon' was a
guest; his name was banished from her hearing, so she was compelled to
have recourse to Marko. Unable to take such services without rewarding
him, she fondled: it pained her to see him suffer. Those who toss crumbs
to their domestic favourites will now and then be moved to toss meat,
which is not so good for them, but the dumb mendicant's delight in it is
winning, and a little cannot hurt. Besides, if any one had a claim on
her it was the prince; and as he was always adoring, never importunate,
he restored her to the pedestal she had been really rudely shaken from by
that other who had caught her up suddenly into the air, and dropped her!
A hand abandoned to her slave rewarded him immeasurably. A heightening
of the reward almost took his life. In the peacefulness of dealing with
a submissive love that made her queenly, the royal, which plucked her
from throne to footstool, seemed predatory and insolent. Thus, after
that scene of 'first love,' in which she had been actress, she became
almost (with an inward thrill or two for the recovering of him)
reconciled to the not seeing of the noble actor; for nothing could erase
the scene--it was historic; and Alvan would always be thought of as a
delicious electricity. She and Marko were together on the summer
excursion of her people, and quite sisterly, she could say, in her
delicate scorn of his advantages and her emotions. True gentlemen are
imperfectly valued when they are under the shadow of giants; but still
Clotilde's experience of a giant's manners was favourable to the liberty
she could enjoy in a sisterly intimacy of this kind, rather warmer than
her word for it would imply. She owned that she could better live the