she felt
more warmly than railing expressed, only her voice shrank back from a
tone of feeling. She consoled herself with the reflection that utterance
was inadequate. Besides, her active good sense echoed Marko ringingly
when he cited the usages of their world and the impossibility of his
withdrawing or wishing to withdraw from the line of a challenge accepted.
It was destiny. She bowed her head lower and lower, oppressed without and
within, unwilling to look at him. She did not look when he left her.

The silence of him encouraged her head to rise. She stared about: his
phantom seemed present, and for a time she beheld him both upright in
life and stretched in death. It could not be her fault that he should
die! it was the fatality. How strange it was! Providence, after bitterly
misusing her, offered this reparation through the death of Marko.

Possibly she ought to run out and beseech Alvan to spare the innocent
youth. She stood up trembling on her legs. She called to Alvan. 'Do not
put blood between us. Oh! I love you more than ever. Why did you let that
horrible man you take for a friend come here? I hate him, and cannot feel
my love of you when I see him. He chills me to the bone. He made me say
the reverse of what was in my heart. But spare poor Marko! You have no
cause for jealousy. You would be above it, if you had. Do not aim; fire
in the air. Do not let me kiss that hand and think . . .'

She sank to her chair, exclaiming: 'I am a prisoner!' She could not walk
two steps; she was imprisoned by the interdict of the house and the
paralysis of her limbs. Providence decreed that she must abide the
result. Dread Power! To be dragged to her happiness through a river of
blood was indeed dreadful, but the devotional sense of reliance upon
hidden wisdom in the direction of human affairs when it appears
considerate of our wishes, inspirited her to be ready for what Providence
was about to do, mysterious in its beneficence that it was! It is the
dark goddess Fortune to the craven. The craven with desires will offer up
bloody sacrifices to it submissively. The craven, with desires expecting
to be blest, is a zealot of the faith which ascribes the direction of
events to the outer world. Her soul was in full song to that contriving
agency, and she with the paralyzed limbs became practically active,
darting here and there over the room, burning letters, packing a portable
bundle of clothes, in preparation for the domestic c