Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/207

196 betrayed her to her fate! The Greek's utter ignorance was almost ludicrous to him.

"Your heart and your conscience have come into sudden play, Conrad mio," he said, indolently. "I never knew before that you kept such old-world weaknesses; no one would have accused you of them!"

"Well! I have been guilty enough to her!" he answered, sullenly, with a dark red flushing his cheek; he was ashamed of his better emotion, as the man he was with now had always made him ashamed of any purer or higher touch that lingered in him.

"It is rather late in the day to think of that!"

"Too late!—my God!"

A terrible remorse was on him, passing, fitful, evanescent, but very ardent, very contrite, whilst it was in its first poignancy, whilst he thought of the ghastly doom in which had closed the splendid life that he had made and marred, the career to which he had wooed and to which he had enchained the youth and the power and the genius of Idalia—a remorse in which he suffered acutely; in which the uncertainty and the peril of her unknown fate were tortures to him; in which he seemed very vile, very accursed in his own sight.