Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/225

217 She paused as she spoke, as they moved down the avenue, the roses strewing the grass path, and the Bosphorus waves flashing through the boughs. The singularity of the words struck him less at that moment than the injunction they gave him to leave her. Leave her!—in the very moment when his quest had been recompensed; in the first hour when, at last in her presence, at last in her home, the fugitive glory of his dreams was made real, and he had found the woman who had literally been to him the angel of life.

Beneath the sun-bronze of his face she saw the blood come and go quickly and painfully; he paused, too, and stood facing her in the cedar aisle, with that gallant and dauntless manhood which lent its kingliness to him by nature.

"Best? For which of us?" "For you." "Then I must refuse to obey."

"Why? Refuse, because it is for yourself that I have spoken?" "Yes. If my presence jeopardised you, I must obey, and rid you of it; if I alone be concerned, I refuse obedience, because I would give up all I have ever prized on earth—save honour—to be near what I have sought so long, and sought so vainly."