Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/64

56 cloistered aisles, and the rich glow of Eastern waters, and the silent gloom of ancient God-forgotten cities; and, from out the waving, shadowy, changing darkness of ally there would have looked a woman's face, with fathomless, luminous eyes, and hair with a golden light upon it, and a proud, weary sorceress smile on the line—the face of a temptress or of an angel?

Bat the mirror had no magic of the future; the glass reflected nothing save the gas-jets of the ormalu sconces; and Fulke Ercddoune sat there in Paris that night, drinking his iced Rhine wines, and smoking his curled Arabian meerschaum, knowing nothing of what lay before him, a blind wanderer in the twilight, a traveller in strange countries, as we are at best in life.