Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/308

300 "I do not receiye this evening, Monsieur; did not my people inform you so? A quick shudder shook him; he it was who had worn the badge of the Silver Ivy, and had answered Victor Vane with three brief pregnant words—"To my cost!" To his cost, his most bitter cost, he had loved her, and he had forced his way to her here in the quiet of the night. He grasped again the hem of her dress, and held her there, looking upward to that fair and fatal face in the radiance of the full moon shining from the sea.

She had destroyed him:—but he could not look on her without growing drank with his own idolatry as men grow drunk with wine.

"Idalia! have yon no pity—no remorse? You know what you have made me, and you give me no mercy? Is your heart stone?" No change came on her face; she smiled with a negligent disdain.

"You have studied at the Porte St. Martin! That is not the way we speak anywhere else in Paris." There was a contemptuous languor in the words more cruel than the bitterest utterance, in earnest, would have been; with scenes and hours so vivid in his memory, in which his love had been lavished at