Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/148

Rh it from its worst bitterness by changing it into hate. I would not even forbid you to change it into scorn." Her eyes were prouder than they had ever been as she thus bade the man, who had centred in her his purest and most exalted faith, give to her the shame of his disdain. As she spoke, with her resistless beauty touched to a yet nobler dignity as she uttered this attainder against her own life, he must have loved her less, or have believed evil swifter than the one who heard her now, who could have followed out her bidding, and stamped the warning down into his soul, till all love of her was dead. He looked at her in silence, and in the heart-stricken pathos of that look she saw how utterly she laid life desolate for him—she felt the recoil of the living death she dealt, as now and then the hunter feels it when he meets the upward dying gaze of the stag his shot has pierced.

In that instant, while bis faith was beaten down for the first moment under the scourges of her words, and the chivalrous idolatry he bore her was bent and blinded under the dead weight of her own self-accusation, the baser alloy of passion alone was on him—he was only conscious of that madness in