possession of her--should say, after she had been led back to her
friends: 'That is he, then! one of the dragons guarding my apple of the
Hesperides, whom I must brush away.'

'He?' replied Clotilde, sincerely feeling Marko to be of as fractional a
weight as her tone declared him. 'Oh, he is my mute, harmless, he does
not count among the dragons.'

But there had been, notwithstanding the high presumption of his remark,
a manful thickness of voice in Alvan's 'That is he!' The rivals had
fastened a look on one another, wary, strong, and summary as the
wrestlers' first grapple. In fire of gaze, Marko was not outdone.

'He does not count? With those eyes of his?' Alvan exclaimed. He knew
something of the sex, and spied from that point of knowledge into the
character of Clotilde; not too venturesomely, with the assistance of
rumour, hazarding the suspicion which he put forth as a certainty, and
made sharply bitter to himself in proportion to the belief in it that his
vehemence engendered: 'I know all--without exception; all, everything;
all! I repeat. But what of it, if I win you? as I shall--only aid me a
little.'

She slightly surprised the man by not striving to attenuate the import
of the big and surcharged All: but her silence bore witness to his
penetrative knowledge. Dozens of amorous gentlemen, lovers, of excellent
substance, have before now prepared this peculiar dose for themselves--
the dose of the lady silent under a sort of pardoning grand accusation;
and they have had to drink it, and they have blinked over the tonic
draught with such power of taking a bracing as their constitutions could
summon. At no moment of their quaint mutual history are the sexes to be