t that was gone to impulse: 'I see it, they have martyrized you. I
know you so well, Clotilde! So, then, come to me, come with me, let me
cherish you. I will take you and rescue you from your people, and should
it be your positive wish to meet Alvan again, I myself will take you to
him, and then you may choose between us.'

The generosity was evident. There was nevertheless, to a young woman
realizing the position foreshadowed by such a project, the suspicion of
a slavish hope nestling among the circumstances in the background, and
this she was taught by the dangerous emotion of gratitude gaining on
her, and melting her to him.

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 pea