Her father had given him hope.

He came bearing eyes that were like hope's own; and kneeling, kissing her hands, her knees, her hair, he seemed unaware that she was inanimate.
There was nothing imaginable in which he could be of use.
He was only another dust-cloud of the sultry sameness.

She had been expecting a woman, a tempest choral with sky and mountain and valley-hollows, as the overture to Alvan's appearance.
But he roused her.

With Marko she had never felt her cowardice, and his passionately beseeching, trembling, 'Will you have me ?' called up the tiger in the girl; in spite of pity for his voice she retorted on her parents: 'Will I have you?
I?
You ask me what is my will?
It sounds oddly from you, seeing that I wrote to you in Lucerne what I would have, and nothing has changed in me since then, nothing! My feeling for him is unaltered, and everything you have heard of me was wrung out of me by my unhappiness.

The world is dead to me, and all in it that is not.
Sigismund Alvan.