Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/159

148 and burnt out, to bear the flame by which ambition may show red against the skíes, or to carry incendiarism in a conqueror's van. This reigned with her beyond all things; had so reigned ever, and would reign until her grave; this impersonal love, this infinite pity, for the concrete suffering, the weary destinies of the peoples, on whom "the burden of the unintelligible world" is bound so hardly, so unequally.

Phaulcon laughed out in defiance of the scorn that lashed him like a whip of scorpions.

"Fine acting—you were always a fine actress!—but this could come as nothing new to you, Miladi. You were sure that your friends were in it"

"God forgive you! I was sure until you swore your innocence; and then—though I might have known that truth trying to pass your lips would become falsehood in such tainted passage!—I did you too much honour, and believed you."

No virulence and no invective could have cast on him so much shame as these last words.

He laughed carelessly still; where he felt himself a coward there he became a bravo; with the rankling wound of humiliation came the brutalised instinct to insult.