Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/132

Rh the low words; he looked with a terrible eagerness into her eyes. "Cannot! Wait. You say you never loved; were you never wedded where you hate?"

"Never."

"Then what is this villain to you?"

She seemed to shrink and shiver where his arms held her, as though his words stabbed her through and through. She kept silence still.

"Tell me," he swore to her, "or, as God lives, that tiger shall, with my shot through his brain to pay for the confession!"

"Hush, hush! If he wake, we are lost!" "I will wake him in such fashion that he never wakes again! An assassin your care? Let me go—let me go, I tell you!" He strove to put her arms from him, to fling off him the coil of her hair, to break from the paralysing spell of her beauty; but she would not loosen him, she would not be shaken off—she drew him farther and farther from the Greek, let him seek as he would to escape from her.

"Oh, my beloved—my beloved ! where is the faith you promised me? One trial—and it breaks! With such a life as mine, do you not know that there must be far darker things than this to try