Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/83

Rh felt the chill, stiffened body of his lost mare, and the grasses w«t with her blood and his own; then thought and recollection awoke from the mists of death, and he remembered all. He knew that he was lying there wounded unto death, beyond all appeal for aid, all hope of succour, powerless to drive from him the frailest insect that with the morning light should begin the £ell work of oorruption and destruction, alone in his last hour in the desolation of the Carpathians, with no companion save the beast of prey, no watcher but the carrion kite. Dread of death he had never known; there was no such coward weakness in him now, in his worst extremity, when he knew that he was dying, in the best years of his manhood, slaughtered by the baseness of treacherous assassination, alone in the pent defile where his murder had been planned, and where no human step would ever come, except it were that of some mountain plunderer, who would strip off the linen and the velvet that the birds of prey would have left untouched, while his bones should lie there through summer drought and winter storm unburied, unlamented, unavenged. Fear was not on him even now in his dying hour, but a mortal sense of loneliness that his life had