nother, wary, strong, and summary as the
wrestlers' first grapple. In fire of gaze, Marko was not outdone.

'He does not count? With those eyes of his?' Alvan exclaimed. He knew
something of the sex, and spied from that point of knowledge into the
character of Clotilde; not too venturesomely, with the assistance of
rumour, hazarding the suspicion which he put forth as a certainty, and
made sharply bitter to himself in proportion to the belief in it that his
vehemence engendered: 'I know all--without exception; all, everything;
all! I repeat. But what of it, if I win you? as I shall--only aid me a
little.'

She slightly surprised the man by not striving to attenuate the import of
the big and surcharged All: but her silence bore witness to his
penetrative knowledge. Dozens of amorous gentlemen, lovers, of excellent
substance, have before now prepared this peculiar dose for
themselves--the dose of the lady silent under a sort of pardoning grand
accusation; and they have had to drink it, and they have blinked over the
tonic draught with such power of taking a bracing as their constitutions
could summon. At no moment of their quaint mutual history are the sexes
to be seen standing more acutely divided. Well may the lady be silent;
her little sins are magnified to herself to the proportion of the
greatness of heart forgiving her; and that, with his mysterious
penetration and a throb of her conscience, holds her tongue-tied. She
does not imagine the effect of her silence upon the magnanimous wretch.
Some of these lovers, it has to be stated in sadness for the good name of
man, have not preserved an attitude that said so nobly, 'Child, thou art
human--thou art woman!' They have undone it and gone to pieces with an
injured lover's babble of persecuting inquiries for confessions. Some, on
the contrary, retaining the attitude, have been unable to digest the
tonic; they did not prepare their systems as they did their dose,
possibly thinking the latter a supererogatory heavy thump on a trifle,
the which was performed by them artfully for a means of swallowing and
getting that obnoxious trifle well down. These are ever after love's
dyspeptics. Very few indeed continue at heart in harmony with their
opening note to the silent fair, because in truth the general
anticipation is of her proclaiming, if not angelical innocence, a softly
reddened or blush-rose of it, where the little guiltiness lies pathetic
on its bed of white.

Alvan's