warning and my oath with it. I swear to you, that wherever I see
Sigismund Alvan I go straight to him, though the way be over you, all of
you, lying dead beneath me.'

The lift of incredulous horror in Marko's large black eyes excited her to
a more savage imagination: 'Rejoice! I should rejoice to see you, all of
you, dead, that I might walk across you safe from disturbance to get to
him I love. Be under no delusion. I love him better than the lives of
any dear to me, or my own. I am his. He is my faith, my worship. I am
true to him, I am, I am. You force my hand from me, you take this
miserable body, but my soul is free to love him and to go to him when God
gives me sight of him. I am Alvan's eternally. All your laws are
mockeries. You, and my people, and your priests, and your law-makers,
are shadows, brain-vapours. Let him beckon!--So you have your warning.
Do what I may, I cannot be called untrue. And now let me be; I want
repose; my head breaks; I have been on the rack and I am in pieces!'

Marko clung to her hand, said she was terrible and pitiless, but clung.

The hand was nerveless: it was her dear hand. Had her tongue been more
venomous in wildness than the encounter with a weaker than herself made
it be, the holding of her hand would have been his antidote. In him
there was love for two.

Clotilde allowed him to keep the hand, assuring herself she was
unconscious he did so. He brought her peace, he brought her old throning
self back to her, and he was handsome and tame as a leopard-skin at her
feet.

If she was doomed to reach to Alvan through him, at least she had warned