at all avenues was blurred by it. The thought that Alvan lay
wounded and in danger, was one thought: that Marko had stretched him
there, was quite another, and was a livid eclipsing thought through which
her grief had to work its way to get to heat and a state of burning. She
knew not in truth what to feel: the craven's dilemma when yet feeling
much. Anger at Providence--rose uppermost. She had so shifted and wound
about, and so pulled her heart to pieces, that she could no longer sanely
and with wholeness encounter a shock: she had no sensation firm enough to
be stamped by a signet.

Even on the fatal third day, when Marko, white as his shrouded
antagonist, led her to the garden of the house, and there said the word
of death, an execrating amazement, framing the thought 'Why is it not
Alvan who speaks?' rose beside her gaping conception of her loss. She
framed it as an earnest interrogation for the half minute before misery
had possession of her, coming down like a cloud. Providence then was too
shadowy a thing to upbraid. She could not blame herself, for the
intensity of her suffering testified to the bitter realness of her love
of the dead man. Her craven's instinct to make a sacrifice of others flew
with claws of hatred at her parents. These she offered up, and the spirit
presiding in her appears to have accepted them as proper substitutes for
her conscience.

CHAPTER XIX

Alvan was dead. The shot of his adversary, accidentally well-directed,
had struck him mortally. He died on the morning of the third day after
the duel. There had been no hope that he could survive, and his agonies
made a speedy dissolution desirable by those most wishing him to live.

The baroness had her summons to hurry to him after his first swoon. She
was his nurse and late confidante a tearless woman, rigid in service.
Death relaxed his hold in her hand. He met his fate like the valiant soul
he was. Haply if he had lingered without the sweats of bodily tortures to
stay reflectiveness, he, also, in the strangeness of his prostration,
might have cast a thought on the irony of the fates felling a man like
him by a youngster's hand and for a shallow girl! He might have fathered
some jest at life, with rueful relish of the flavour: for such is our
manner of commenting on ourselves when we come to shipwreck through
unseaworthy pretensions. There was no interval on his passage from
anguish to immobility.

Silent was that house of many ch