The letter was long, involved, rather eloquent when she forgot herself and wrote herself, and intentionally very feminine, after the manner of supplicatory ladies appealing to lawyers, whom they would sway by the feeble artlessness of a sex that must confide in their possession of a heart, their heads being too awful.

She was directing the letter when Marko Romaris gave his name outside her door.  He was her intimate, her trustiest ally; he was aware of her design to communicate with Dr. Storchel, and came to tell her it would be a waste of labour.  He stood there singularly pale and grave, unlike the sprightly slave she petted on her search for a tyrant.  ‘Too late,’ he said, pointing to the letter she held.  ‘Dr. Storchel has gone.’

She could not believe it, for Storchel had informed her that he would remain three days.  Her powers of belief were more heavily taxed when Marko said:  ‘Alvan has challenged your father to fight him.’  With that he turned on his heel; he had to assist in the deliberations of the family.

She clasped her temples.  The collision of ideas driven together by Alvan and a duel—­Alvan challengeing her father—­Alvan, the contemner of the senseless appeal to arms for the settlement ’of personal disputes!—­ darkened her mind.  She ran about the house plying all whom she met for news and explanations; but her young brother was absent, her sisters were ignorant, and her parents were closeted in consultation with the gentleman.  At night Marko sent her word that she might sleep in peace, for things would soon be arranged and her father had left the city.

She went to her solitude to study the hard riddle of her shattered imagination of Alvan.  The fragments would not suffer joining, they assailed her in huge heaps; and she did not ask herself whether she had ever known him, but what disruption it was that had unsettled the reason of the strongest man alive.  At times he came flashing through the scud of her thoughts magnificently in person, and how to stamp that splendid figure of manhood on a madman’s conduct was the task she supposed herself to be attempting while she shrank from it, and worshipped the figure, abhorred the deed.  She could not unite them.  He was like some great cathedral organ foully handled in the night by demons.  He, whose lucent reason was an unclouded sky over every complexity of our sphere, he to crave to fight! to seek the life-blood of the father of his beloved!  More unintelligible than this was it to reflect that he must know the challenge to be of itself a bar to his meeting his Clotilde ever again.  She led her senses round to weep, and produced a state of mental drowning for a truce to the bitter riddle.