Clotilde made sign and gave some earnest on his arm of ecstatic hugging. ‘We may have hard battles, grim deceptions, to go through before that day comes,’ he continued after a while. ‘The day is coming, but we must wait for it, work on. I have the secret of how to head the people--to put a head to their movement and make it irresistible, as I believe it will be beneficent. I set them moving on the lines of the law of things. I am no empty theorizer, no phantasmal speculator; I am the man of science in politics. When my system is grasped by the people, there is but a step to the realization of it. One step. It will be taken in my time, or acknowledged later. I stand for index to the people of the path they should take to triumph--must take, as triumph they must sooner or later: not by the route of what is called Progress--pooh! That is a middle-class invention to effect a compromise. With the people the matter rests with their intelligence! meanwhile my star is bright and shines reflected.’ ‘I notice,’ she said, favouring him with as much reflection as a splendid lover could crave for, ‘that you never look down, you never look on the ground, but always either up or straight before you.’ ‘People have remarked it,’ said he, smiling. ‘Here we are at this funereal tree again. All roads lead to Rome, and ours appears to conduct us perpetually to this tree. It ‘s the only dead one here.’ He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branches decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass. It was very witch-like, of a witch in her incantation-smoke. ‘Not a single bare spot! but dead, dead as any peeled and fallen!’ said Alvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen. ‘This is a tree for a melancholy poet--eh, Clotilde?--for him to come on it by moonlight, after a scene with his mistress, or tales of her! By the way and by the way, my fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind of garb for me, should I be ordered off the first to join the dusky army below. Women who put on their dead husbands in public are not well-mannered women, though they may be excellent professional widows, excellent!’ He snapped the lichen-dust from his fingers, observing that he was not sure the contrast of the flourishing and blighted was not more impressive in sunlight: and then he looked from the tree to his true love’s hair. The tree at a little distance seemed run over with sunless lizards: her locks were golden serpents. ‘Shall I soon see your baroness?’ Clotilde asked him.