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 poetic life--that is, trifle with fire and reflect on its charms in the society of Marko.

He was very young, he was little more than an adolescent, and safely timid; a turn of her fingers would string or slacken him.