Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/124

Rh be piled between us and the world, there are human minds barren of every good thing, uncultured, useless, needing the commonest tillage. I should be free there, and you would be a king in your own right. It needs just such a sovereign as you would be, my dauntless, lion-hearted wanderer! We might be happy? We might reach still more yet than merely happiness?"

And they dreamed of the Future, while the brilliant day stole onward, and the stillness of intense heat brooded over the sun-lighted earth; the Future that to him was a treasury of joys so passionate, so measureless, so incredible, that they seemed passing all hope, escaping all reach; the Future that to her was in its fairest vision but as a mirage of that lost land of peace and liberty, which her own act had forfeited for ever.