She too had a slavish hope that was athirst and sinking, and it flew at the throat of Marko’s, eager to satiate its vengeance for these long delays in the destroying of a weaker.

She left her chair and cried:  ’As you will.  What is it to me?  Take me, if you please.  Take that glove; it is the shape of my hand.  You have as much of me as is there.  My life is gone.  You or another!  But take this warning and my oath with it.  I swear to you, that wherever I see Sigismund Alvan I go straight to him, though the way be over you, all of you, lying dead beneath me.’

The lift of incredulous horror in Marko’s large black eyes excited her to a more savage imagination:  ’Rejoice!  I should rejoice to see you, all of you, dead, that I might walk across you safe from disturbance to get to him I love.  Be under no delusion.  I love him better than the lives of any dear to me, or my own.  I am his.  He is my faith, my worship.  I am true to him, I am, I am.  You force my hand from me, you take this miserable body, but my soul is free to love him and to go to him when God gives me sight of him.  I am Alvan’s eternally.  All your laws are mockeries.  You, and my people, and your priests, and your law-makers, are shadows, brain-vapours.  Let him beckon!—­So you have your warning.  Do what I may, I cannot be called untrue.  And now let me be; I want repose; my head breaks; I have been on the rack and I am in pieces!’

Marko clung to her hand, said she was terrible and pitiless, but clung.

The hand was nerveless:  it was her dear hand.  Had her tongue been more venomous in wildness than the encounter with a weaker than herself made it be, the holding of her hand would have been his antidote.  In him there was love for two.

Clotilde allowed him to keep the hand, assuring herself she was unconscious he did so.  He brought her peace, he brought her old throning self back to her, and he was handsome and tame as a leopard-skin at her feet.

If she was doomed to reach to Alvan through him, at least she had warned him.  The vision of the truthfulness of her nature threw a celestial wan beam on her guilty destiny.

She patted his head and bade him leave her, narrowing her shoulders on the breast to let it be seen that the dark household within was locked and shuttered.

He went.  He was good, obedient, humane; he was generous, exquisitely bred; he brought her peace, and he had been warned.  It is difficult in affliction to think of one who belongs to us as one to whom we owe a duty.  The unquestionably sincere and devoted lover is also in his candour a featureless person; and though we would not punish him for his goodness, we have the right to anticipate that it will be equal to every trial.  Perhaps, for the sake of peace . . . after warning him . . . her meditations tottered in dots.