Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/163

152 earliest day resting still midway between earth and heaven. Sound there was none, save close at hand the low music of a monaco's wing, and from afar the swinging cadence of a chiming angelus.

She stood silent, looking long outward through the fragrant coils of orange-blossom and of climbing ivy that hung in their green shadow before the oval of the window, towards the waking world that smiled below. To her, whose heart had never beaten for one of those which had throbbed for her, there came at last some recoil of the suffering which she had so often dealt, some touch of that futile pain which for her and through her had been so often borne. She saw still, in memory, the wondering and grieved reproach of the eyes which had haunted her throughout all the past hours.

"Do I love!—I!" she thought, while a laugh half haughty, half ironic, and yet more mournful than either, came on her lips. And she turned back again from the brightness of the day with a gesture of her old imperious disdain. She was too proud, too sceptical, too used to command, too unused to weakness, not to be loth to admit such yielding folly in her, not to be contemptuous of her own softer thoughts and tenderer impulses. Love!—to her it was a fool's paradise, a gay and