he was then, the hour would be revived,--she would certainly feel him as
he lived and breathed now. Thus she fancied, on the effort to get him to
her heart after the shock he had dealt it, for he had become almost a
stranger, as a god that has taken human shape and character.

Next to the sight of Alvan her friend Marko was welcome. The youth
visited her in the evening, and with the glitter of his large black eyes
bent to her, and began talking incomprehensibly of leave-taking and
farewell, until she cried aloud that she had riddles enough: one was too
much. What had he to say? She gave him her hand to encourage him. She
listened, and soon it was her hand that mastered his in the grasp, though
she was putting questions incredulously, with an understanding duller
than her instinct. Or how if the frightful instinct while she listened
shot lightnings in her head, whose revelations were too intelligible to
be looked at? We think it devilish when our old nature is incandescent to
talk to us in this way, kindled by its vilest in hoping, hungering, and
fearing; and we call on the civilized mind to disown it. The tightened
grasp of her hand confessed her understanding of the thing she pressed to
hear repeated, for the sake of seeming to herself to repudiate it under
an accumulating horror, at the same time that the repetition doubly and
trebly confirmed it, so as to exonerate her criminal sensations by
casting the whole burden on the material fact.

Marko, with her father's consent and the approval of the friends of the
family, had taken up Alvan's challenge! That was the tale. She saw him
dead in the act of telling it.

'What?' she cried: 'what?' and then: 'You?' and her fingers were bonier
in their clutch: 'Let me hear. It can't be!' She snapped at herself for
not pitying him more but a sword had flashed to cut her gordian knot: she
her saw him dead, the obstacle removed, the man whom her parents opposed
to Alvan swept away: she saw him as a black gate breaking to a flood of
light. She had never invoked it, never wished, never dreamed it, but if
it was to be? . . . 'Oh! impossible. One of us is crazy. You to fight?
. . . they put it upon you? You fight him? But it is cruel, it is
abominable. Incredible! You have accepted the challenge, you say?'

He answered that he had, and gazed into her eyes for love.

She blinked over them, crying out against parents and friends for their
heartlessness in permitting him to fight.