Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/22

Rh light that here and there streamed through them seemed to mock him with fugitive tormenting glimpse, only serving to make the darkness darker still.

At last, when the greyness of dawn was breaking, there was a slight noise that stirred the stillness: the shutter unclosed, the glass door opened, he saw her—alone. There was no one now in the apartment, and she stood in the open window looking out on the sea that stretched far below, round the broken and jutting cliffs.

He leaned down scarcely breathing, till he hung half way over the chasm; was it possible that in this solitude she thought of him? Were those men anything to her, or was he more than they, or nothing?—not even a regret? The moon at that moment strayed through on to the ledge, and she saw his shadow hanging midway down over the precipice» whose fatal depth slanted straight into the sea which had worn a narrow way through the fissure five hundred feet below. A cry of horror broke from her that had a greater tenderness in it than lies only in a mere fear for life imperilled; for all answer he swung himself one moment on the ledge, balanced the distance with an unerring eye, and with a mountaineer's leap that the glens and