Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/118

Rh wholly in those few brief sentences. Memories also came to him, revived by her relation—memories vague and fugitive, as of things scarcely heard before, because without interest at the time of their hearing, of stories that had floated to him in clubs and cafés in the cities of Europe, long ere he had met Idalia, of some beautiful Greek or Roumelian, of whom men told marvels of loveliness and sorcery, and about whose reputation had gathered many spléndid idle romances, fabulous as they were contradictory—romances that gave a thousand magnificent impossible legends to the records of her life, but stole from her, as such romances ever will, all "the white flower of a blameless life," and made her pleasures as guilty, and her charms as resistless, as those of Lucrezia or Theodora. He had never heeded them in their telling; he had cared little for women, still less for the babble of slanders, and they had passed him without interest enough to linger on his remembrance an hour. But now—with the words of her story—they recurred to him as such forgotten things will. Not to sting him with doubts of her, with fear for himself—suspicion of her was a thing impossible to him—but to madden him with impatient longing to reach her calumniators and strike them down. His nature was too bold for slander to