now behind the scenes, Clotilde laid hold of her phantom baroness, almost
happy under the phantom's whisper that she need not despair. 'You have
been a little weak,' the phantom said to her, and she acquiesced with a
soft sniffle, adding: 'But, dearest, honoured lady, you are a woman, and
know what our trials are when we are so persecuted. O that I had your
beautiful sedateness! I do admire it, madam. I wish I could imitate.'
She carried her dramatic ingenuousness farthel still by saying: 'I have
seen your photograph'; implying that the inimitable, the much coveted air
of composure breathed out of yonder presentment of her features. 'For I
can't call you good looking,' she said within herself, for the
satisfaction of her sense of candour, of her sense of contrast as well.
And shutting her eyes, she thought of the horrid penitent a harsh-faced
woman in confession must be:

The picture sent her swimmingly to the confessional, where sat a man with
his head in a hood, and he soon heard enough of mixed substance to dash
his hood, almost his head, off. Beauty may be immoderately frank in soul
to the ghostly. The black page comprised a very long list. 'But put
this on the white page,' says she to the surging father inside his box--
'I loved Alvan!' A sentence or two more fetches the Alvanic man jumping
out of the priest: and so closely does she realize it that she has to
hunt herself into a corner with the question, whether she shall tell him
she guessed him to be no other than her lover. 'How could you expect a
girl, who is not a Papist, to come kneeling here?' she says. And he
answers with no matter what of a gallant kind.

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