Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/247

236 gleamed out under their veiled and velvet softness with a tiger-like ferocity, that those knew well as their death-doom who dared cross the will of Monsignore,

"In gold—no!" she echoed. "You seek my political secrets. Well, you will never have them."

"What!" His voice was very low still, and vibrated with the intensity of restrained passion through the silence of the cell. "You will renounce your pomp, your wealth, your pleasures, your ambitions, your freedom, for the toil of a convict, the chains of a felon, the solitude of a dungeon, the slow, festering, hopeless, endless existence of a prisoner whom no power can release save the warrant of death!" Her face was still, set, colourless as marble, and as firm:—

"Yes, if liberty be only to be bought by the shame of treachery." He looked at her, forced out of himself, as it were, by the tribute she wrung from him:—

"Mother of God! What a man you would have been!—you would have ruled the world."

She smiled with a disdainful weariness.

"Who knows? I might have been a court