Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/148

Rh "Why speak in parables? You must know" "That your faith is dying? Well, let it die. It has every right. I will not reproach you!"

"It will never die. But—why should you wring my heart to test it?"

"Test it! Ah! do not wrong me like that! Do you think I would cause you an instant's pain that was in my power to spare? Do you think I would spend a woman's miserable chicaneries and heartless vanities on you, or triumph in them at your cost?

"Answer me," she pursued; her voice had changed to intense appeal, to vivid emotion, and she held his hands cióse against her heart, looking upward at him with a longing that broke down all her courage and her pride—the longing that he, at least, should know that she was true to him, though she must withhold him from his justice, and deny him all he had a title to hear. "Be my law, my conscience—I have been steeped so long in evil, I have lost all fitness to judge honour or dishonour aríght. To tell you all, to lay my Ufe before you as it should be laid, I must break my oath, I must belie my word, I must be false to the chief thing that has ever redeemed my past. Answer me—shall I do it?"