Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/140

129 quailed beforo. She seemed broken by an unutterable contrition; stricken before him by the conscious guilt of a criminal before her judge; the prayer for pardon, the thirst for his mercy, seemed to be as intense as if the crime against his life had been woven by her brain, and instigated by her will, as though the hand of the Greek, sleeping unconscious in the hollowed cleft of rock below, had been her tool and servant.

Yet there was not one pause of doubt, one hesitation of dread, in the answer that came to her with a gentleness, grave and infinitely sad.

"Forgive! That is no word between you and me. Yet,—if there be anything of pardon needed from my life to yours in past, or present, or future, I give the pardon now, once and for ever; you cannot stretch it farther than my love will yield it." She heard, and her head sank downward, till her lips touched his hand in the sign of homage and allegiance that she had refused to the claim of monarchs. Her eyes were blind with tears, her heart was filled with a despair bitter as death, with a sweetness sweet as life; he was at once her slave and her ruler, her judge and her saviour. "Ah, Heaven!" she said, in her soul. "How vainly I sought for a great nature amidst those who