Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/276

Rh homage, with peril that only lent them keener zest, richer flavour; she had loved them, though beneath the purple, fetters had held her, and amidst her insouciance remorse had pursued her; she had loved them—and they were dead for ever. She was chained here a prisoner of captors who never spared until their brother-tyrant, Death, claimed their spoil and their prey at their hands.

"It is just—only just," she thought, while her head leaned on the cold steel clasping her wrist, and the black moisture-dripping blocks of the cell enclosed her as though already she were in her grave. "I sent them to their graves; it is only just that I should have a felon's doom." A shiver ran through her like a shiver of intense cold, though the close air of the cell was oppressive and scorching! It was not for her own life, but for the lives that had fallen around her, like wheat beneath the sickle in the banqueting-halls of Antina.

The silence was unbroken; one burning ray of the outer sun stole though the loophole and flashed on the gyves enclosing the hand, whose lightest touch had thrilled men's veins like fire and impelled them where it would; the dank, noiseless, grey gloom was like the gloom of a charnel-house.