‘You say it?’

The courage to repeat her cry was wanting.

She trembled visibly:  she could more readily have bidden him bear her hence than have named a day for the interview with her parents; but desperately she feared that he would be the one to bid; and he had this of the character of destiny about him, that she felt in him a maker of facts.  He was her dream in human shape, her eagle of men, and she felt like a lamb in the air; she had no resistance, only terror of his power, and a crushing new view of the nature of reality.

‘I see!’ said he, and his breast fell.  Her timid inability to join with him for instant action reminded him that he carried many weights:  a bad name among her people and class, and chains in private.  He was old enough to strangle his impulses, if necessary, or any of the brood less fiery than the junction of his passions.  ’Well, well!—­but we might so soon have broken through the hedge into the broad highroad!  It is but to determine to do it—­to take the bold short path instead of the wearisome circuit.  Just a little lightning in the brain and tightening of the heart.  Battles are won in that way:  not by tender girls! and she is a girl, and the task is too much for her.  So, then, we are in your hands, child!  Adieu, and let the gold-crested serpent glide to her bed, and sleep, dream, and wake, and ask herself in the morning whether she is not a wedded soul.  Is she not a serpent? gold-crested, all the world may see; and with a mortal bite, I know.  I have had the bite before the kisses.  That is rather an unjust reversal of the order of things.  Apropos, Hamlet was poisoned—­ghost-poisoned.’

‘Mad, he was mad!’ said Clotilde, recovering and smiling.

’He was born bilious; he partook of the father’s constitution, not the mother’s.  High-thoughted, quick-nerved to follow the thought, reflective, if an interval yawned between his hand and the act, he was by nature two-minded:  as full of conscience as a nursing mother that sleeps beside her infant:—­she hears the silent beginning of a cry.  Before the ghost walked he was an elementary hero; one puff of action would have whiffed away his melancholy.  After it, he was a dizzy moralizer, waiting for the winds to blow him to his deed-ox out.  The apparition of his father to him poisoned a sluggish run of blood, and that venom in the blood distracted a head steeped in Wittenberg philosophy.  With metaphysics in one and poison in the other, with the outer world opened on him and this world stirred to confusion, he wore the semblance of madness; he was throughout sane; sick, but never with his reason dethroned.’

‘Nothing but madness excuses his conduct to Ophelia!’

‘Poison in the blood is a pretty good apology for infidelity to a lady.’

‘No!’

‘Well, to an Ophelia of fifty?’ said Alvan.

Clotilde laughed, not perfectly assured of the wherefore, but pleased to be able to laugh.  Her friends were standing at the house door, farewells were spoken, Alvan had gone.  And then she thought of the person that Ophelia of fifty might be, who would have to find a good apology for him in his dose of snake-bite, or love of a younger woman whom he termed gold-crested serpent.