Quiet reigned in the household next day, and for the length of the day.  Her father had departed, her mother treated her vixenishly, snubbing her for a word, but the ugly business of yesterday seemed a matter settled and dismissed.  Alvan, then, had been appeased.  He was not a man of blood:  he was the humanest of men.  She was able to reconstruct him under the beams of his handsome features and his kingly smile.  She could occasionally conjure them up in their vividness; but had she not in truth been silly to yield to spite and send him back the photographs of him with his presents, so that he should have the uttermost remnant of the gifts he asked for?  Had he really asked to have anything back?  She inclined to doubt all that had been done and said since their separation —­if only it were granted her to look on a photograph showing him as he was actually before their misunderstanding!  The sun-tracing would not deceive, as her own tricks of imageing might do:  seeing him as he was then, the hour would be revived,—­she would certainly feel him as he lived and breathed now.  Thus she fancied, on the effort to get him to her heart after the shock he had dealt it, for he had become almost a stranger, as a god that has taken human shape and character.

Next to the sight of Alvan her friend Marko was welcome.  The youth visited her in the evening, and with the glitter of his large black eyes bent to her, and began talking incomprehensibly of leave-taking and farewell, until she cried aloud that she had riddles enough:  one was too much.  What had he to say?  She gave him her hand to encourage him.  She listened, and soon it was her hand that mastered his in the grasp, though she was putting questions incredulously, with an understanding duller than her instinct.  Or how if the frightful instinct while she listened shot lightnings in her head, whose revelations were too intelligible to be looked at?  We think it devilish when our old nature is incandescent to talk to us in this way, kindled by its vilest in hoping, hungering, and fearing; and we call on the civilized mind to disown it.  The tightened grasp of her hand confessed her understanding of the thing she pressed to hear repeated, for the sake of seeming to herself to repudiate it under an accumulating horror, at the same time that the repetition doubly and trebly confirmed it, so as to exonerate her criminal sensations by casting the whole burden on the material fact.

Marko, with her father’s consent and the approval of the friends of the family, had taken up Alvan’s challenge!  That was the tale.  She saw him dead in the act of telling it.

‘What?’ she cried:  ‘what?’ and then:  ‘You?’ and her fingers were bonier in their clutch:  ‘Let me hear.  It can’t be!’ She snapped at herself for not pitying him more but a sword had flashed to cut her gordian knot:  she her saw him dead, the obstacle removed, the man whom her parents opposed to Alvan swept away:  she saw him as a black gate breaking to a flood of light.  She had never invoked it, never wished, never dreamed it, but if it was to be? . . .  ’Oh! impossible.  One of us is crazy.  You to fight? . . . they put it upon you?  You fight him?  But it is cruel, it is abominable.  Incredible!  You have accepted the challenge, you say?’