Marko clung to her hand, said she was terrible and pitiless, but clung.

The hand was nerveless:  it was her dear hand.  Had her tongue been more venomous in wildness than the encounter with a weaker than herself made it be, the holding of her hand would have been his antidote.  In him there was love for two.

Clotilde allowed him to keep the hand, assuring herself she was unconscious he did so.  He brought her peace, he brought her old throning self back to her, and he was handsome and tame as a leopard-skin at her feet.

If she was doomed to reach to Alvan through him, at least she had warned him.  The vision of the truthfulness of her nature threw a celestial wan beam on her guilty destiny.

She patted his head and bade him leave her, narrowing her shoulders on the breast to let it be seen that the dark household within was locked and shuttered.

He went.  He was good, obedient, humane; he was generous, exquisitely bred; he brought her peace, and he had been warned.  It is difficult in affliction to think of one who belongs to us as one to whom we owe a duty.  The unquestionably sincere and devoted lover is also in his candour a featureless person; and though we would not punish him for his goodness, we have the right to anticipate that it will be equal to every trial.  Perhaps, for the sake of peace . . . after warning him . . . her meditations tottered in dots.

But when the heart hungers behind such meditations, that thinking without language is a dangerous habit; for there will suddenly come a dash usurping the series of tentative dots, which is nothing other than the dreadful thing resolved on, as of necessity, as naturally as the adventurous bow-legged infant pitches back from an excursion of two paces to mother’s lap; and not much less innocently within the mind, it would appear.  The dash is a haven reached that would not be greeted if it stood out in words.  Could we live without ourselves letting our animal do our thinking for us legibly?  We live with ourselves agreeably so long as his projects are phrased in his primitive tongue, even though we have clearly apprehended what he means, and though we sufficiently well understand the whither of our destination under his guidance.  No counsel can be saner than that the heart should be bidden to speak out in plain verbal speech within us.  For want of it, Clotilde’s short explorations in Dot-and-Dash land were of a kind to terrify her, and yet they seemed not only unavoidable, but foreshadowing of the unavoidable to come.  Or possibly—­the thought came to her—­Alvan would keep his word, and save her from worse by stepping to the altar between her and Marko, there calling on her to decide and quit the prince; and his presence would breathe courage into her to go. to him.  It set her looking to the altar as a prospect of deliverance.