Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/120

Rh so young to the world that I yet believed I and Truth could avail to convince and to conquer it!—my name was stained too deeply, all undreamt of by me, for any future career, had it been pure as a child's, to wash the stain away. I was slandered—unjustly. Slandered, I say! It was a thousand times worse than that. A traitor took the blank page of my youth and wrote it over behind my back with infamous, indelible falsehood"

A heavy curse broke asunder her words.

" Tell me who he was, and vengeance shall find him." She passed her hand over his brow with a gentle caress.

"No. You shall have no darkness on you from my past of my bringing. But—you do not fear to take to your heart a woman whom the world has called evil thus?"

"The world! What terrors do you think that liar has for me?"

She smiled—a smile in which there was as much of weariness as of sweetness.

"It is not always a liar; it was not so always in what it said of me. But we will leave that! Today is our own; we will not poison it. You think we may make our way to the sea to-night?"