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.

He was a lover, surely a lover:  he slid off to some chance bit of likeness to himself in every subject he discussed with her.

And she?  She speeded recklessly on the back of the centaur when he had returned to the state of phantom and the realities he threatened her with were no longer imminent.

CHAPTER V

Clotilde was of the order of the erring who should by rights have a short sermon to preface an exposure of them, administering the whip to her own sex and to ours, lest we scorn too much to take an interest in her.  The exposure she had done for herself, and she has not had the art to frame her apology.  The day after her meeting, with her eagle, Alvan, she saw Prince Marko.  She was gentle to him, in anticipation of his grief; she could hardly be ungentle on account of his obsequious beauty, and when her soft eyes and voice had thrilled him to an acute sensibility to the blow, honourably she inflicted it.