Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/153

142 crushed by the horror which had possessed her from the first moment that she had seen the sleeping Greek and heard his crime. Humiliation rested on her; the deadliest suffering such a nature as hers can ever know—a thing which, until the sun had set in the past day, had never touched her temper. A shame that was ineffaceable seemed to her burnt into her life for ever, and under it a strength which had never succumbed, a dignity which had never blenched or quailed before the sternest trials, surrendered at last. She had had the fortitude of men, the fearlessness of soldiers, but they seemed, for the hour at least, to die out in her now.

He looked at her, and he saw that the privations of her prison, the scant food of many days, the exertion of the long and breathless ride, had told heavily upon her;—and he who would have coined his very life to purchase aid for her, could do no more for her than the flock of sea-gulls that flew past them with the breaking of the morning. He struck his heel into the sand with an agony of powerless grief.

"You will perish here of hunger, of thirst, of sun-stroke, of misery! I will go. I will bring help, if there be help on earth."

He went down the low strip of sanded shore,