Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/59

48 had a keen dread of this "Border Eagle," who had been invulnerable under so many shots, and had had a resurrection almost from the grave; a dread nearly as strong as his hate for him. Moreover, with that action be remembered many things, policy before all, which forbade him to attempt any risk of reckoning with the man he had left for dead in the Carpathians. He took one long glance at him—the glance of hatred is as lingering as that of love, and of still surer recollection—then hastily and noiselessly turned aside over the thick grasses, and went bis way down to the beach. It was not through any sense of shame or of humanity that be left the sleeping man unharmed, it was not even that he would have shrunk from crushing the life out of him as mercilessly as out of a cicala; it was only that he remembered the danger and unwisdom of such self-indulgence, and also, in some faint emotion, he felt a sense that Idalia was near them both—too near for him to sink into such crime as this. In his own way he loved her, in his own way revered her, though he cared nothing how he tortured, almost as little how he ruined her. While under her influence he could not be his worst.

An hour later he had crossed the bay, and