'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. To you I am accustomed to speak every thought of my
soul, and I tell you the world and all it has is dead to me, even my
parents--I hate them.'

Marko pressed her hands. If he loved her slavishly, it was generously.
The wild thing he said was one of the frantic leaps of generosity in a
heart that was gone to impulse: 'I see it, they have martyrized you. I
know you so well, Clotilde! So, then, come to me, come with me, let me
cherish you. I will take you and rescue you from your people, and should
it be your positive wish to meet Alvan again, I myself will take you to
him, and then you may choose between us.'

The generosity was evident. There was nevertheless, to a young woman
realizing the position foreshadowed by such a project, the suspicion of a
slavish hope nestling among the circumstances in the background, and this
she was taught by the dangerous emotion of gratitude gaining on her, and
melting her to him.

She too had a slavish hope that was athirst and sinking, and it flew at
the throat of Marko's, eager to satiate its vengeance for these long
delays in the destroying of a weaker.

She left her chair and cried: 'As you will. What is it to me? Take me, if
you please. Take that glove; it is the shape of my hand. You have as much
of me as is there. My life is gone. You or another! But take this warning
and my oath with it. I swear to you, that wherever I see Sigismund Alvan
I go straight to him, though the way be over you, all of you, lying dead
beneath me.'

The lift of incredulous horror in Marko's large black eyes excited her to
a more savage imagination: 'Rejoice! I should rejoice to see you, all of
you, dead, that I might walk across you safe from disturbance to get to
him I love. Be under no delusion. I love him better than the lives of any
dear to me, or my own. I am his. He is my faith, my worship. I am true to
him, I am, I am. You force my hand from me, you take this miserable body,
but my soul is free to love him and to go to him when God gives me sight
of him. I am Alvan's eternally. All your laws are mockeries. You, and my
people, and your prie