Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/157

146 wild ride besides your lover and you. I have been on your track all the night through. Where is he?—where? Answer me, or"

She threw up her hands wíth a gesture, that even in that moment awed him:

"Never dare breathe his name!—you, his robber, his assassin." "Robber! Assassin! Strange words to me." The fire of his wrath was bated for an instant before the resurrection of the crime he had deemed buried from her reach beneath the solitary shadows of the Carpathian pine-woods.

"Would that they were strange to you! I knew that coward sin had your hand in it, and you swore by the only memory you have ever reverenced that you were innocent. I believed you—I was fool enough for that!—because, though treachery was your native air, you still at your worst had never taken perjured oath by that one name."

She spoke slowly, wearily, with an unutterable reproach and bitterness in the quiet words; under them he was for the moment cowed; he shook «lightly through all his limbs, and his teeth gnawed the gold curls of bis beard.

"It was to serve what you worship—Liberty!" he stammered.