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?

‘You—­him!’ she said, in the tremendous compression of her contempt.

She laughed.  The world is upside down—­a world without light, or pointing finger, or affection for special favourites, and therefore bereft of all mysterious and attractive wisdom, a crazy world, a corpse of a world—­if this be true!

But it can still be disbelieved.

He stood by her dejectedly, and she sent him flying with a repulsive, ‘Leave me!’ The youth had too much on his conscience to let him linger.  His manner of going smote her brain.

Was it credible?  Was it possible to think of Alvan wounded?—­the giant laid on his back and in the hands of the leech?  Assuredly it was a mockery of all calculations.  She could not conjure up the picture of him, and her emotions were merely struck and stunned.  If this be true!