Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/165

154 She could see the shore far below—down through a wreathing, shimmering interspace of green leaves. She had rescued men at far keener, closer danger than there was in this. She had gone to Russian masked-balls, ignorant whether at any moment the hand of an Imperial officer might not be laid on her domino, and her fettered limbs be borne away without warning, through the frozen night, over leagues on leagues and steppes on steppes of snow, to the Siberian doom which awaits the defenders of Poland. She had swept at a wild gallop through the purple gloom of the midnight Campagna with her courage only rising the higher, her eyes only gleaming the darker. She had glided in her gondola through balmy spring sunsets, when all Venice was wreathed and perfumed with flowers in some Austrian festa, and had laughed, and coquetted, and stirred her fan, and listened languidly to the music, while hidden beneath her awning was one whom the casemates of the Quadrilateral would endose only to let him issue to his death, unless her skill could save him. She had passed through many hours of supreme peril, personal and for others, and the disquietude had not been on her that was on her now.

She leaned there against the casement watching the beach beneath, where it stretched out along the