Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/46

Rh with that lustre of disdtain that was in them, mingled with a momentary wistfulness of recollection.

"Yes, I loved you once," she answered, and her voice had an excessive gentleness in it; but he knew her meaning too well to ask why it was that this was now solely and irrevocably of the past.

He was silent some moments; the dashing and reckless Free Lance felt an embarrassment and a sense of mortification in her presence. He could hold this haughty and exquisite woman in a grip of steel, and feel a savage victory in forcing the proud neck that would not bend, to lie beneath his heel; he could take a refined exultation of cruelty in seeing her pride rebel, her instincts recoil, her dignity suffer mutely; he could amuse himself with all this with a rich pleasure in it. Nevertheless, he owed her many and heavy debts; he gave her an admiration that was tinged still with a strange tyrannous wayward sort of love; he held her in an unwilling homage that made him half afraid of her, and he shrank under the sense of her censure and of her rebuke.

In one sense he was her master, but in another she was far above him, in another she was his ruler, and escaped his power.

He rose restlessly; the glance he gave her was