of it by his broken look, the terrible mournfulness less than the horrible irony of the truth gnawed within her.  It spoke to her in metal, not in flesh.  It haunted her feelings and her faint imaginations alienly.  It discoloured, it scorned the earth, and earth’s teachings, and the understanding of life.  Rational clearness at all avenues was blurred by it.  The thought that Alvan lay wounded and in danger, was one thought:  that Marko had stretched him there, was quite another, and was a livid eclipsing thought through which her grief had to work its way to get to heat and a state of burning.  She knew not in truth what to feel:  the craven’s dilemma when yet feeling much.  Anger at Providence—­rose uppermost.  She had so shifted and wound about, and so pulled her heart to pieces, that she could no longer sanely and with wholeness encounter a shock:  she had no sensation firm enough to be stamped by a signet.

Even on the fatal third day, when Marko, white as his shrouded antagonist, led her to the garden of the house, and there said the word of death, an execrating amazement, framing the thought ’Why is it not Alvan who speaks?’ rose beside her gaping conception of her loss.  She framed it as an earnest interrogation for the half minute before misery had possession of her, coming down like a cloud.  Providence then was too shadowy a thing to upbraid.  She could not blame herself, for the intensity of her suffering testified to the bitter realness of her love of the dead man.  Her craven’s instinct to make a sacrifice of others flew with claws of hatred at her parents.  These she offered up, and the spirit presiding in her appears to have accepted them as proper substitutes for her conscience.

CHAPTER XIX

Alvan was dead.  The shot of his adversary, accidentally well-directed, had struck him mortally.  He died on the morning of the third day after the duel.  There had been no hope that he could survive, and his agonies made a speedy dissolution desirable by those most wishing him to live.

The baroness had her summons to hurry to him after his first swoon.  She was his nurse and late confidante a tearless woman, rigid in service.  Death relaxed his hold in her hand.  He met his fate like the valiant soul he was.  Haply if he had lingered without the sweats of bodily tortures to stay reflectiveness, he, also, in the strangeness of his prostration, might have cast a thought on the irony of the fates felling a man like him by a youngster’s hand and for a shallow girl!  He might have fathered some jest at life, with rueful relish of the flavour:  for such is our manner of commenting on ourselves when we come to shipwreck through unseaworthy pretensions.  There was no interval on his passage from anguish to immobility.

Silent was that house of many chambers.  That mass of humanity profusely mixed of good and evil, of generous ire and mutinous, of the passion for the future of mankind and vanity of person, magnanimity and sensualism, high judgement, reckless indiscipline, chivalry, savagery, solidity, fragmentariness, was dust.