there and roared across the household that any one holding communication
with the prisoner should be shot like a dog. This was a manifestation of
power in a form more convincing than the orator's.

She was friendless, abused, degraded, benighted in broad daylight;
abandoned by her lover. She sank on the floor of the room, conceiving
with much strangeness of sentiment under these hard stripes of
misfortune, that reality had come. The monster had hold of her. She was
isolated, fed like a dungeoned captive. She had nothing but our natural
obstinacy to hug, or seem to do so when wearifulness reduced her to cling
to the semblance of it only. 'I marry Alvan!' was her iterated answer to
her father, on his visits to see whether he had yet broken her; and she
spoke with the desperate firmness of weak creatures that strive to nail
themselves to the sound of it. He listened and named his time for
returning. The tug between rigour and endurance continued for about
forty hours. She then thought, in an exhaustion: 'Strange that my father
should be so fiercely excited against this man! Can he have reasons I
have not heard of?' Her father's unwonted harshness suggested the
question in her quailing nature, which was beginning to have a movement
to kiss the whip. The question set her thinking of the reasons she knew.
She saw them involuntarily from the side of parents, and they wore a
sinister appearance; in reality her present scourging was due to them as
well as to Alvan's fatal decision. Her misery was traceable to his
conduct and his judgement--both bad. And yet all this while he might be
working to release her, near upon rescuing! She swung round to the side
of her lover against these executioner parents, and scribbled to him as
well as she could under the cracks in her windowshutters, urging him to
appear. She spent her heart on it. A note to her friend, the English
lady, protested her love for Alvan, but with less abandonment, with a
frozen resignation to the loss of him--all around her was so dark! By-