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.