“Never, Gerald,” she returned, with startling impressiveness, while the color, which during the warm embrace of her lover had returned to it once more, fled from her cheek.  “To challenge him would be but to ensure your own doom, for few in the army of the United States equal him in the use of the pistol or the small sword; and, even were it otherwise,” she concluded, her eye kindling into a fierce expression, “were he the veriest novice in the exercise of both, my vengeance would be incomplete, did he not go down to his grave with all his sins on his head.  No, no, Gerald, in the fulness of the pride of existence must he perish.  He must not dream of death until he feels the blow that is aimed at his heart.”

The agitation of Matilda was profound beyond any thing she had ever yet exhibited.  Her words were uttered in tones that betrayed a fixed and unbroken purpose of the soul, and when she had finished, she threw her face upon the bosom of her lover, and ground her teeth together with a force that showed the effect produced upon her imagination, by the very picture of the death she had drawn.

A pause of some moments ensued.  Gerald was visibly disconcerted, and the arm which encircled the waist of the revengeful woman dropped, as if in disappointment, at his side.

“How strange and inconsistent are the prejudices of man,” resumed Matilda, half mournfully, half in sarcasm; “here is a warrior—­a spiller of human life by profession; his sword has been often dyed in the heart blood of his fellow man, and set he shudders at the thought of adding one murder more to the many already committed.  What child-like weakness!”

“Murder!  Matilda; call you it murder to overcome the enemies of one’s country in fair and honorable combat, and in the field of glory?”

“Call you it what you will—­disguise it under whatever cloak you may—­it is no less murder.  Nay, the worst of murders, for you but do the duty of the hireling slayer.  In cold blood, and for a stipend, do you put an end to the fair existence of him who never injured you in thought or deed, and whom, under other circumstances, you would perhaps have taken to your heart in friendship.”

“This is true, but the difference of the motive, Matilda?  The one approved of heaven and of man, the other alike condemned of both.”

“Approved of man, if you will; but that they have the sanction of heaven, I deny.  Worldly policy and social interests alone have drawn the distinction, making the one a crime, the other a virtue; but tell me not that an all wise and just God sanctions or approves the slaying of his creatures because they perish, not singly at the will of one men, but in thousands and tens of thousands at the will of another.  What is there more sacred in the brawls of Kings and Potentates, that the blood they cause to be shed in torrents for some paltry breach of etiquette, should sit more lightly on their souls than the few solitary drops, spilt by the hand of revenge, on that of him whose existence is writhing under a sense of acutest injury?”