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.

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.