Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/114

106 from an aureole of light, half sunlit and half shadowed. "Now I know that I have seen it, or I could not have painted it," said Erceldoune to himself, as he cast down his brushes; and to know that, was why he had done so.

"Keep the picture, madam, as altar-piece, or what it please you, in token of my gratitude at the least for the kindness I cannot hope to return," he said to the Mother Superior; "and, if you ever see a woman whose likeness you recognise in it, she will be the one to whom I first owed the rescue of my life. Tell her Fulke Erceldoune waits to pay his debt"

And Mother Veronica heard him with as much pain in his last words as she had had pleasure in his first, for she saw that the phantom of his delirium was still strong on him, and feared that his mind must wander, to be so haunted by this mere hallucination of the lady of his dreams. A few days later on, Erceldoune, able at last to endure the return journey through the mountains and across Hungary, attended a Te Deum to gratify the Abbess, in celebration and thanksgiving for his own restoration from death to life; left his three months' pay to the almsgiving of the Order; bowed