Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/74

Rh from baffled love, wound its way into his thoughts again. Before now, he had been a cold tactician, an unscrupulous intriguer, a man who cared nothing at what cost his ends were gained, but still one who, from innate gentleness of temper and instinctive refinement of nature, had felt no sort of temptation towards grosser and darker evil; had, indeed, ridiculed it as the clumsy weapon of the ignorant and the fool; now he was in that mood when the heart of the man possessed by it cries thirstily, "Evil, be thou my good."

"I have all their cards in my hands," he thought, where he leaned, musingly flinging the buds of the gum-cistus into the water below. "A word from me—and her haughty head would lie on the stone floor of a dungeon."

The thought grew on him, strangely changing the character of his features as it worked out its serpent’s undulations through his mind. His clear and sunny eyes grew cruel; his delicate lips hardened into a straight acrid line; his smooth brow darkened and contracted; this man, who had had before but the subtle, graceful swoop, the bright, unerring keenness of the falcon, now stooped lower, and had the merciless craft, the lust to devour and to destroy, of the fox.