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?’

He answered that he had, and gazed into her eyes for love.

She blinked over them, crying out against parents and friends for their heartlessness in permitting him to fight.

‘This is positive?  This is really true?’ she said, burning and dreading to realize the magical change it pointed on, and touching him with her other hand, loathing herself, loathing parents and friends who had brought her to the plight of desiring some terrible event in sheer necessity.  Not she, it was the situation they had created which was guilty!  By dint of calling out on their heartlessness, and a spur of conscience, she roused the feeling of compassion: 

’But, Marko!  Marko! poor child! you cannot fight; you have never fired a pistol or a gun in your life.  Your health was always too delicate for these habits of men; and you could not pull a trigger taking aim, do you not know?’

‘I have been practising for a couple of hours to-day,’ he said.