Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/155

144 which had so long made jest of every suffering, that it scarcely now spared her own.

"I know now what sort of despair fills monasteries and makes saints," she thoúght. "How honourable to Deity, to give him the flotsam and jetsam of a wrecked existence!"

Twelve hours before she had said, and said truly, that none of her race ever failed; she had known that her life had been great in much even whilst blamable in more; she had spoken of a future, in which much of dominion, of magnificence, of a pure and noble ambition would still linger;—a future in the glow of eastern suns, in the lands of her inheritance, in the exercise of a chieftainship, where boundless evil remained to be conquered, and boundless liberty to be enjoyed; a future in consonance with the hatred of all bondage, and the genius to rule, that were inborn in her. Yet now—now, since she had stooped down and seen the ruddy afterlight upon the face of the slumbering Athenian—an endless night seemed to have fallen on her, and every dream of future and of freedom to be mockery.

Through the silence of the quiet dawn she sat without any movement; the half-dead horses were feebly trying to find food from the salted grasses and drink from the brackish pools; there