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 him.