Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/131

120 must have wrenched her beautiful limbs asunder before he could have left her; she drew him backward and backward, her breath against his cheek, her hair showered on his breast, her dignity broken, her self-control forgot, vivid emotion, agonised abandonment, making her a hundredfold more resistless in that hour than she had ever been in her proudest moments of supremacy. She knew her power; under that embrace he stood subdued, irresolute, remembering nothing except the loveliness on which he looked.

"Is that your love?" she asked him. "Is that your trust?"

She felt a tremor run through all his frame—the tremor of the blind rage against his foe, of the blind idolatry of her, that warred within him.

"I break neither because I will deal with my assassin! What is he to you that you should shield him?"

The first taint of jealousy ran through the words. The tremor of shame that he had seen when her glance first fell upon the Greek passed over her; yet her gaze met his, and never sank beneath it.

"I cannot tell you."

There was an accent of hatred deep as his own in