Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/56

Rh of Tiberio towering yonder in the light. Half the victory was in his hands, half in hers. To gain the rest, he knew that he must wait.

He left her, and went out across the gardens and down the winding way that led along the rocks to the shore. He was not wholly satisfied with his morning's work; he felt the mute resistance of a proud nature against a power of which he was tyrannously and inexorably jealous, and he knew that this power did not extend over her money, of which he had often received much, of which he was always wanting to receive more. Besides, with all his evil triumph in galling and goading her to his uttermost ingenuity, a certain shame was always on him before Idalia, and a certain love for her always survived in his heart; love that was always strangely blent with something of unwilling homage, of reluctant awe, and, now and then, of absolute repentance.

He would not have undone one of the links of the fetters he had made her wear under the purple-hemmed and gold-broidered robes of her beauty, freedom, and supremacy; but at the same time, in her presence or freshly from it, he felt ashamed of having forged them. Long habit had killed almost everything in him that had once been a little better;