Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/95

84 her triumphs and her victories when the felon's branding-iron eats its hot road into her breast? She will be dead—as dead as in her grave."

The persuasive eloquence with which nature had endowed him left his tongue with a silken stealing sound, like the gliding movement of some serpentine thing, made more ornate in its eloquence by the richness of the Italian words he used. But there was beneath it the hiss of hatred, the ravenous thirst of desired vengeance, the lust that painted to itself her doom, and gloated on its own pictures with a hellish pleasure. Giulio Villaflor caught that accent, and thought, with his acute trained wisdom:

"He has loved her—he will be true to us, then. There is no hate so sure-footed and so relentless as that hate."

"Figlio mio," he said, with his mellowest smile, resting his glance so cruel yet so caressing on the man who henceforward would be no longer his master, but his instrument, once having let him glean his secret, "you should have been in our Church; you have an orator's powers. How many souls you would have won!"

"Pardon me, your Eminence! it is more amusing work, more to my taste at least—to lose them."