  The main point of Clarke and Strong's comment, namely that our results
concerning the effect of integrability on the hopping of electrons between
chains are probably not related to the notion of coherence proposed in
\cite{clarke}, is important and well taken. In fact, we have already stressed
in our work that integrability affects the intermediate-time behaviour but not
the short-time one, while in \cite{clarke} the authors make predictions about
the long-time dynamics on the basis of a calculation at short times. The
logical conclusion is then that these two effects are in fact different
phenomena. In more recent papers we have numerically investigated other
physical quantities (spectral function, transverse conductivity in relation to
the notion of coherence developed in \cite{clarke}.
