nd that mastered his in the grasp,
though she was putting questions incredulously, with an understanding
duller than her instinct. Or how if the frightful instinct while
she listened shot lightnings in her head, whose revelations were too
intelligible to be looked at? We think it devilish when our old nature
is incandescent to talk to us in this way, kindled by its vilest in
hoping, hungering, and fearing; and we call on the civilized mind to
disown it. The tightened grasp of her hand confessed her understanding
of the thing she pressed to hear repeated, for the sake of seeming to
herself to repudiate it under an accumulating horror, at the same time
that the repetition doubly and trebly confirmed it, so as to exonerate
her criminal sensations by casting the whole burden on the material
fact.

Marko, with her father's consent and the approval of the friends of the
family, had taken up Alvan's challenge! That was the tale. She saw him
dead in the act of telling it.

'What?' she cried: 'what?' and then: 'You?' and her fingers were bonier
in their clutch: 'Let me hear. It can't be!' She snapped at herself for
not pitying him more but a sword had flashed to cut her gordian knot:
she her saw him dead, the obstacle removed, the man whom her parents
opposed to Alvan swept away: she saw him as a black gate breaking to a
flood of light. She had never invoked it, never wished, never dreamed
it, but if it was to be?... 'Oh! impossible. One of us is crazy. You to
fight? ... they put it upon you? You fight him? But it is cruel, it is
abominable. Incredible! You have accepted the challenge, you say?'

He answered that he had, and gazed into her eyes for love.

She blinked over them, crying out against parents and friends for their
heartlessness in permitting him to fight.

'This is positive? This is really true?' she said, burning and dreading
to realize the magical change it pointed on, and touching him with
her other hand, loathing herself, loathing parents and friends who
had brought her to the plight of desiring some terrible event in sheer
necessity. Not she, it was the situation they had created which was
guilty! By dint of calling out on their heartlessness, and a spur of
conscience, she roused the feeling of compassion:

'But, Marko! Marko! poor child! you cannot fight; you have never fired
a pistol or a gun in your life. Your health was always too delicate for
these habits of men; and you could not pull a trigger takin