Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/220

Rh like him also, that no Roman thief had been the dealer of that stroke home to the lungs as the sculptor felt his way up the dark winding staircase, whose blackness the oil fiicker of a single lamp only rendered deeper gloom; but that it had been a pitiless vengeance for an oath taken in boyhood, and in manhood broken.

He knew it; wherever he went, whatever he did, howsoever high he rose in eminence, whatsoever fruitage he gathered from the seed of treachery, the possibility of that doom would pursue him, the dread of it would haunt him—a worse fate than the stroke itself, sharply and swiftly dealt. The sword would ever hang above his head wherever his banquet should be spread, whatever nobles and princes should be summoned to it. Let him dupe his early comrades, or reign in his new sovereignties as he would, he could never dismiss this from him—this chance, that soon or late the vengeance for his desertion would search him out, and strike him in the hour of his surest security, of his proudest triumph.

Yet the step was taken; there was no receding now, and he knew that he had in him to rule empires if once he could grasp but the hem of power. He ground his teeth where he gazed down