Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/129

118 less than that with which the sight of the slumberiüg Greek had stirred her.

"You know him!" She seized his wrist, and, with the convulsive force that comes to the most delicate women in their hours of extremity, shook his grasp from the arm of the tree, whose foliage fell once more between them and the sight of that bright Athenian beauty that lay there in the careless rest of the Lykegênes.

"Know him!—do I know him!" "Ay! Do you know the man who sought to murder me?" There was the first sternness of waking fury, the first unconscious violence of stealing doubt, in the question as it broke from him, while he vainly wrought to wrench his wrists from the close grasp she held them in, and be free to fall upon his enemy as lions fall on their foes. With them her courage returned, her self-command came back to her, though her face was bloodless still, and anguish was set on it; she looked him full in the eyes—eyes for the first time bent on her with the searching severity of an accuser.

"Yes. I know him. I did not know that he was your assassin, though—though—I grant I feared it."