Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/129

Rh sea depths, when he plunged down into the dark violet waves, and let them close above his head; he saw it with every gorgeous sunset that flushed the skies with fire; he remembered it with every hour he spent alone lying on the sands, or steering through the waters, or waiting with his ride for the sea-birds on the pine-crowned rocks. He could not banish it; and he used no sophism or half-truths with himself; he knew that, vision or reality, which ever it was, it had dominion over him, and that the search he so thirsted to make for his assassins was not more closely woven with his thoughts than the quest of what was but "un ombre, un reve, un rien"—a phantom and a shadow.

The boat dropped down the Mediterranean that night, while the sun was setting, drifting gently through the blue stretch of the waves, while the striped sails were filled by a west wind that brought over the sea a thousand odours from the far Levant, and the voices of the women idly chaunted the "Ave Maria, Stella Virgine!" Erceldoune was stretched in the bottom of the boat, at the feet of a fair aristocrat, who leaned her hand over the leeward side playing with the water, and letting the drops fall, diamond bright as her rings, glancing at him now and then the while, and wondering, as she