Madame Emerly took mute counsel of Clotilde, shaking her own head premonitorily; and then she said: 'I think indeed it will be safer, if I am asked, to say you are not here, and I know not where you are.'
'Yes! yes!' Clotilde replied: 'Oh! do that.'
She half turned to Alvan, rigid with an entreaty that hung on his coming voice.
'No!' said Alvan, shocked in both pride and vanity. 'Plain-dealing; no subterfuge! Begin with foul falsehood? No. I would not have you burdened, madame, with the shadow of a conventional untruth on our account. And when it would be bad policy? . . . Oh, no, worse than the sin! as the honest cynic says. We will go down to Madame von Rudiger, and she shall make acquaintance with the man who claims her daughter's hand.'
Clotilde rocked in an agony. Her friend was troubled. Both ladies knew what there would be to encounter better than he. But the man, strong in his belief in himself, imposed his will on them.
Alvan and Clotilde clasped hands as they went downstairs to Madame
Emerly's reception room. She could hardly speak: 'Do not forsake me.'
'Is this forsaking?' He could ask it in the deeply questioning tone which supplies the answer.
'Oh, Alvan!' She would have said: 'Be warned.'
He kissed her fingers. 'Trust to me.'
She had to wrap her shivering spirit in a blind reliance and utter leaning on him.