This was the day of Providence:  she had strung herself to do her part in it and gone through the pathos of her fatalism above stairs in her bedroom before Marko took his final farewell of her, so she could speak her ‘Heaven be with you!’ unshaken, though sadly.  Her father had returned.  To be away from him, and close to her bundle, she hurried to her chamber and awaited the catastrophe, like one expecting to be raised from the vaults.  Carriage, wheels would give her the first intimation of it.  Slow, very slow, would imply badly wounded, she thought:  dead, if the carriage stopped some steps from the house and one of the seconds of the poor boy descended to make the melancholy announcement.  She could not but apprehend the remorselessness of the decree.  Death, it would probably be!  Alvan had resolved to sweep him off the earth.  She could not blame Alvan for his desperate passion, though pitying the victim of it.  In any case the instant of the arrival of the carriage was her opportunity marked by the finger of Providence rendered visible, and she sat rocking her parcel on her lap.  Her love of Alvan now was mixed with an alluring terror of him as an immediate death-dealer who stood against red-streaked heavens, more grandly satanic in his angry mightiness than she had ever realized that figure, and she, trembled and shuddered, fearing to meet him, yearning to be taken to him, to close her eyes on his breast in blindest happiness.  She gave the very sob for the occasion.

A carriage drove at full speed to the door.  Full speed could not be the pace for a funeral load.  That was a visitor to her father on business.  She waited for fresh wheels, telling herself she would be patient and must be ready.

Her pathos ways ready and scarcely controllable.  The tear thickened on her eyelid as she projected her mind on the grief she would soon be undergoing for Marko:  or at least she would undergo it subsequently; she would certainly mourn for him.  She dared not proceed to an accumulated enumeration of his merits, as her knowledge of the secret of pathos knew to be most moving, in an extreme fear that she might weaken her required energies for action at the approaching signal.

Feet came rushing up the stairs:  her door was thrown open, and the living Marko, stranger than a dead, stood present.  He had in his look an expectation that she would be glad to behold him, and he asked her, and she said:  ‘Oh, yes, she was glad, of course.’  She was glad that Alvan had pardoned him for his rashness; she was vexed that her projected confusion of the household had been thwarted:  vexed, petrified with astonishment.

‘But how if I tell you that Alvan is wounded?’ he almost wept to say.

Clotilde informs the world that she laughed on hearing this.  She was unaware of her ground for laughing:  It was the laugh of the tragic comedian.

Could one believe in a Providence capable of letting such a sapling and weakling strike down the most magnificent stature upon earth?