Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/281

Rh another, and nature would give us a paradise if men did not make us a hell. Dreams—dreams—youth is all a dream, and life too, some metaphysicians say. Where shall we wake, I wonder, and how—for the better? It is to be hoped so, if we ever wake at all, which is more than doubtful!"

There was an accent of sadness in the opening words, but the rest were spoken with that irony which, while it was never bitter, was more contemptuous than bitterness in its half languid levity. He looked at her with a vague and troubled pain—there was so much in the complexity of her nature that was veiled from him; seeing her life but dimly, there was so much of splendour, so much of melancholy in it, that exiled him from her, and that oppressed him; the more magnificent her lineage or her fortunes, the farther she was from him.

"You have one empire already," he said, almost abruptly, in the tumult of the suppressed thoughts in him—"a wider one than the Byzantine! You can do what you will with men's lives. I have nothing, I can lose nothing, except the life you give me back; but if I had all the kingdoms of the earth I would throw them away for" The eagerness in his voice dropped suddenly, leaving the words unfinished; he crashed them into