eflective, if an interval yawned between his hand and the act, he was
by nature two-minded: as full of conscience as a nursing mother that
sleeps beside her infant:--she hears the silent beginning of a cry.
Before the ghost walked he was an elementary hero; one puff of action
would have whiffed away his melancholy. After it, he was a dizzy
moralizer, waiting for the winds to blow him to his deed-ox out. The
apparition of his father to him poisoned a sluggish run of blood,
and that venom in the blood distracted a head steeped in Wittenberg
philosophy. With metaphysics in one and poison in the other, with the
outer world opened on him and this world stirred to confusion, he wore
the semblance of madness; he was throughout sane; sick, but never with
his reason dethroned.'

'Nothing but madness excuses his conduct to Ophelia!'

'Poison in the blood is a pretty good apology for infidelity to a lady.'

'No!'

'Well, to an Ophelia of fifty?' said Alvan.

Clotilde laughed, not perfectly assured of the wherefore, but pleased to
be able to laugh. Her friends were standing at the house door, farewells
were spoken, Alvan had gone. And then she thought of the person that
Ophelia of fifty might be, who would have to find a good apology for
him in his dose of snake-bite, or love of a younger woman whom he termed
gold-crested serpent.

He was a lover, surely a lover: he slid off to some chance bit of
likeness to himself in every subject he discussed with her.

And she? She speeded recklessly on the back of the centaur when he had
returned to the state of phantom and the realities he threatened her
with were no longer imminent.

CHAPTER V

Clotilde was of the order of the erring who should by rights have a
short sermon to preface an exposure of them, administering the whip to
her own sex and to ours, lest we scorn too much to take an interest in
her. The exposure she had done for herself, and she has not had the art
to frame her apology. The day after her meeting, with her eagle, Alvan,
she saw Prince Marko. She was gentle to him, in anticipation of his
grief; she could hardly be ungentle on account of his obsequious
beauty, and when her soft eyes and voice had thrilled him to an acute
sensibility to the blow, honourably she inflicted it.

'Marko, my friend, you know that I cannot be false; then let me tell you
I yesterday met the man who has but to lift his hand and I go to him,
and he may lead me whither he will.'