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.

Even on the fatal third day, when Marko, white as his shrouded
antagonist,