Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/226

218 It was all but a declaration of love, to a woman of whom he knew nothings save her beauty and her name. She read him as she would have read a book, but she did not show her knowledge. "You are very rash," she said, softly, without a touch of irony now. "I have said truly, I have said wisely, it will be best for you that our friendship should not continue—should barely commence. If you persist in it, the time will, in every likelihood, come when you will condemn me, and reproach yourself for it. I speak in all sincerity, even though I do not give you my reasons. You consider—very generously—that you owe me a debt; it would be best paid by obeying what I say now, and forgetting me, as if we had never met."

She spoke with the courtly ease of a woman of the world, of a woman used to speak and to be obeyed, to guide and to be followed; but there was a certain inflection of regretful bitterness in her voice, a certain shadow of troubled weariness in her eyes, as if she did not send him from her without some reluctance. They were strange words; but she had known too many of the multiform phases of life to have any feminine fear of singularity or of its imputation, and had passed through unfamiliar