Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/134

Rh your right; but you will never look upon my face again."

"Because I am his foe?"

"No! Because you doubt me."

With that one word she pierced him to the quick.

He had no strength, no memory, no thought, save of her and of her will; he looked back once to where his slumbering traitor lay, with the mad longing of denied vengeance in the look, then slowly, and with his head bent, he turned away.

"Be it as you will. I yield you to-day more than my life itself."

And as she heard, all her coldness and her imperious resolve died out, as though they had not been; she sank into his outstretched arms, and wept as she had never done in all her haughty womanhood—wept uncontrollably, agonisedly, in such abandonment, in such weakness, as the sovereign temper in her never, ere then, had known.

At sight of that grief he forgot his own wrong, his own doubt, his very vengeance; he remembered nothing, except that the woman for whom he would have laid down his life suffered thus, while to her suffering he could bring no more consolation than though he stood a stranger before her. It was not in him to have one thought of his