Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/144

Rh which now and then fell on her at rare intervals gathered in her eyes. She pitied him, she honoured him; she would willingly, at all cost to herself, have effaced every thought which bound him to her, and saved him from every pang that came to him through her; but she was too proud and too world-worn to recognise that there might be a feeling even beyond this in her heart for him. Even had she recognised it, it would not have changed her purpose—the purpose which had made her let him see her as he had done through the past evening—the purpose to toy with him no more, but to put from him, now and for ever, the vainness of hopes which could but fatally beguile, only to as fatally betray, him.

She could do this as no other woman could have done; she had dealt with men in all the force of their enmities, all the height of their follies, in their most dangerous hours as in their most various moods; through paths no other of her sex could have approached, Idalia passed unhesitating and with impunity, and one of the secrets of her great power lay in her perfect and unerring knowledge of human nature. With the first hour in which she had seen the man who now stood with her, she had known his character as profoundly as she knew it