Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/40

Rh more blinded still than he was, who should have dared to do either.

He was left there alone, in the midst of the white warm light and of the burnished leaves swaying against the marble columns; to his lips oaths never came, he was too finely polished, but an imprecation was hurled back upon his heart that cursed her with a terrible bitterness, and a hatred great as was his baffled passion. He hated her for his own folly in bending to the common weakness of men; he hated her for the disdainful truth with which he had penetrated the mixed motives in his heart; he hated her for the shame she had put upon him of offering her a rejected and despised passion; he hated her for all the numberless sorceries of her fascination, of her brilliance, of her pride, which had made him weak as water before their spell. To win her there was nothing he would have checked at; she had become the incarnation of his ambitions, as she might have been the means of their fruition; all that gave her danger to other men but gave her added intoxication for him; she would have been to him, had she but loved him, what the genius and the beauty of her whom they called Hellas Rediviva were to Tallien. And more bitter than pride stung, or vanity pierced,