But he roused her.  With Marko she had never felt her cowardice, and his passionately beseeching, trembling, ‘Will you have me?’ called up the tiger in the girl; in spite of pity for his voice she retorted on her parents: 

’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 priests, and your law-makers, are shadows, brain-vapours.  Let him beckon!—­So you have your warning.  Do what I may, I cannot be called untrue.  And now let me be; I want repose; my head breaks; I have been on the rack and I am in pieces!’