But it can be resolutely disbelieved.

We can put it before Providence to cleanse itself of this thing, or suffer the consequence that we now and for ever quit our worship, lose our faith in it and our secret respect.  She heard Marko’s tale confirmed, whispers of leaden import, physicians’ rumours, and she doubted.  She clung insanely to her incredulity.  Laughter had been slain, but not her belief in the invincibility of Alvan; she could not imagine him overthrown in a conflict—­and by a hand that she had taken and twisted in her woman’s hand subduingly!  He, the unerring shot, laid low by one who had never burnt powder till the day before the duel!  It was easier to remain incredulous notwithstanding the gradational distinctness of the whispers.  She dashed her ‘Impossible!’ at Providence, conceived the tale in wilful and almost buoyant self-deception to be a conspiracy in the family to hide from her Alvan’s magnanimous dismissal of poor Marko from the field of strife.  That was the most evident fact.  She ran through delusion and delusion, exhausting each and hugging it after the false life was out.

So violent was the opposition to reason in the idea of Alvans descending to the duel and falling by the hand of Marko, that it cried to be rebutted by laughter:  and she could not, she could laugh no more, nor imagine laughing, though she could say of the people of the house, ’They act it well!’ and hate them for the serious whispering air, and the dropping of medical terms and weights of drugs, which robbed her of what her instinct told her was the surest weapon for combating deception.  Them, however, and their acting she could have with stood enough to silently discredit them through sheer virulence of a hatred that proved them to be duly credited.  But her savage wilfulness could not resist the look of Marko.  She had to yield up her breast to the truth, and stimulate further unbelief lest her loaded heart should force her to run to the wounded lion’s bedside, and hear his reproaches.  She had to cheat her heart, and the weak thing consented to it, loathing her for the imposture.  Seeing Marko too, assured of it by his broken look, the terrible mournfulness less than the horrible irony of the truth gnawed within her.  It spoke to her in metal, not in flesh.  It haunted her feelings and her faint imaginations alienly.  It discoloured, it scorned the earth, and earth’s teachings, and the understanding of life.  Rational clearness at all avenues was blurred by it.  The thought that Alvan lay wounded and in danger, was one thought:  that Marko had stretched him there, was quite another, and was a livid eclipsing thought through which her grief had to work its way to get to heat and a state of burning.  She knew not in truth what to feel:  the craven’s dilemma when yet feeling much.  Anger at Providence—­rose uppermost.  She had so shifted and wound about, and so pulled her heart to pieces, that she could no longer sanely and with wholeness encounter a shock:  she had no sensation firm enough to be stamped by a signet.