of the strongest man alive. At times he came flashing through the scud
of her thoughts magnificently in person, and how to stamp that splendid
figure of manhood on a madman's conduct was the task she supposed
herself to be attempting while she shrank from it, and worshipped the
figure, abhorred the deed. She could not unite them. He was like some
great cathedral organ foully handled in the night by demons. He, whose
lucent reason was an unclouded sky over every complexity of our sphere,
he to crave to fight! to seek the life-blood of the father of his
beloved! More unintelligible than this was it to reflect that he must
know the challenge to be of itself a bar to his meeting his Clotilde
ever again. She led her senses round to weep, and produced a state of
mental drowning for a truce to the bitter riddle.

Quiet reigned in the household next day, and for the length of the day.
Her father had departed, her mother treated her vixenishly, snubbing her
for a word, but the ugly business of yesterday seemed a matter settled
and dismissed. Alvan, then, had been appeased. He was not a man of
blood: he was the humanest of men. She was able to reconstruct him
under the beams of his handsome features and his kingly smile. She could
occasionally conjure them up in their vividness; but had she not in
truth been silly to yield to spite and send him back the photographs of
him with his presents, so that he should have the uttermost remnant of
the gifts he asked for? Had he really asked to have anything back?
She inclined to doubt all that had been done and said since their
separation--if only it were granted her to look on a photograph showing
him as he was actually before their misunderstanding! The sun-tracing
would not deceive, as her own tricks of imageing might do: seeing him as
he was then, the hour would be revived,--she would certainly feel him as
he lived and breathed now. Thus she fancied, on the effort to get him
to her heart after the shock he had dealt it, for he had become almost a
stranger, as a god that has taken human shape and character.

Next to the sight of Alvan her friend Marko was welcome. The youth
visited her in the evening, and with the glitter of his large black
eyes bent to her, and began talking incomprehensibly of leave-taking and
farewell, until she cried aloud that she had riddles enough: one was too
much. What had he to say? She gave him her hand to encourage him. She
listened, and soon it was her ha