Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/334

Rh strangers though they were—that they met thus but for her sake. It was the work of an instant, yet to the Neapolitan it seemed long as half a life, that struggle in which the lightning swoop of his unseen enemy swept him from his prey, and bore down on him with the might of vengeance, in the silence of the night which he had thought had veiled his tyranny and his crime from all eyes. No living man had ever crossed the will or the passions of the great prelate until now that he was seized as lions seize in the death-grapple.

They were almost perfectly matched; equal in strength as in stature, though in one a life of adventure and hardihood had braced all that in the other a life of effeminate indulgence had enervated. Giulio Villaflor beneath his sacerdotal robes had a warrior's frame and a warrior's soul; many a time, hearing of battle-fields and soldier's perils, he had longed to gird a sword on his loins and go down in the van to the slaughter; and as the gripe of Erceldoune's hand fastened on his throat, and the gleam of his enemy's eyes flashed suddenly into his, the desert rage, the desert courage, roused in the silken soft-footed panther of the Church. In the lamp-lit cell, under the black vaulted roof, in the hush of the midnight-silenced monastery,