Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/154

Rh under the beetling shadow of the cliffs, northward to the fishing village on the edge of the waters, with low rounded cabin-roofs that were like clustered brown bee-hives beneath the giant shadow of the rocks. The wall of stone screened him from view; the hamlet was a mile or more along the coast; she was left alone, with the hound at her feet, the loaded weapon in her hand, the glistening sea ebbing away into the distance where her eyes were fixed.

She sat motionless, whilst the noise of his footfall on the wet sands died gradually away. She listened to them to their last faint sound.

"Ah! if only for his sake he could pass out from my life for ever," she murmured. "Either way I must sin to him;—by forsaking him, or by cleaving to him. To go to his heart with such dishonour as that untold"

She could have wished that the stroke of the sun, rising stormily eastward, could reach and still her life; that the waves rolling slowly one on another to her feet could come to her and wash her down into their darkness. For she felt tainted with an assassin's and a traitor's guilt of secrecy and shame. She laughed a little, with the unutterable weariness of futile pain; with the ironical temper