Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/70

Rh they will be again. Valerían was a common soldier, Themistocles was a bastard, Bonaparte an artillery officer—what has been may be again. They were once far farther off power than I. For myself, I could do all that is possible—with her, I would do the impossible!"

A smile crossed his face at the dreaming wildness of his own thoughts; his profound acumen could never so wholly desert him that he could be the prey to any emotion without some sense of ridicule and disdain even for himself; but there was more of paín at his heart than of self-contempt; he felt, even amidst the jealous bitterness that was turning his love into hatred, that he should have become a better and a truer man had Idalia returned his passion.

"I dream like a boy, or a madman!" he thought, while his hand crushed with a fierce gesture an odorous crown of orange-flowers, and flung the bruised petals out to the sea. "And yet,—with her,—I could have had force in me to make even such dreams real. If she had loved me, I would have slaved for her, dared for her, conquered for her. If she had loved me, there is nothing I would not have compassed."

Even where he stood in solitude, his lips quivered