Rhetoric in a worthy cause has good chances of carrying the gravest, and the cause might reasonably seem excellent to the professor when one promising fair to be the political genius of his time, but hitherto not the quietest of livers, could make him believe that marriage with this girl would be his clear salvation.
The second step was undesignedly Clotilde's.
She was on the professor's arm at one of the great winter balls of her conductor's brethren in the law, and he said: 'Alvan is here.' She answered: 'No, he has not yet come.'-- How could she tell that he was not present in the crowd?
'Has he come now ?' said the professor.
'No.' And no Alvan was discernible.
'Now ?' 'Not yet.' The professor stared about.

She waited.
'Now he has come; he is in the room now,' said Clotilde.
Alvan was perceived.

He stood in the centre of the throng surrounding him to buzz about some recent pamphlet.
She could well play at faith in his magnetization of her, for as by degrees she made herself more nervously apprehensive by thinking of him, it came to an overclouding and then a panic; and that she took for the physical sign of his presence, and by that time, the hour being late, Alvan happened to have arrived.

The touch of his hand, the instant naturalness in their speaking together after a long separation, as if there had not been an interval, confirmed her notion of his influence on her, almost to the making it planetary.

And a glance at the professor revealed how picturesque it was.