Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/161

150 Idalia passed on to her own apartments. These were not the first lives she had saved by many; at personal cost, personal peril; saved with courage, and daring, and fertile expedient; but they were as nothing to her in this moment beside the many more that through her had been lost. She had not yet slept or rested for a moment, but she felt no sense of fatigue, no willingness to sleep. Alone, the proud sapphire-crowned head of the coquette, the lionne, the sorceress, the brow that would have borne so royally the Byzantine diadem of her ancestral Comneni, drooped wearily, yet not from physical weariness; the flush upon her cheeks had faded, and her form, with its trailing rich-hued skirts, and jewels flashing in an eastern splendour, was in strange contrast with the melancholy of her attitude and of her thoughts as she stood there in solitude at last, with the dawning light of the young day shut out by draperies of falling silk, and a single Etruscan lamp only burning near.

"Now he has seen me as I am," she thought—"as I am!" A smile crossed her lips, but it was a smile more sad than tears;—there was in it so much hatred of herself. "It was but just to him. No cruelty from me would kill his love, but his own scorn may. They love me for my beauty, because I