Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/161

150 King who came to the altar-steps with murder on his soul. "Go! Show the only remorse and reparation that you can still reach, and let my life be free of you for ever."

Again it had its weight on him, that sentence of banishment, grandly given, yet withal having in it a certain aching regret as of one who once had loved him well, though he had fallen: as of one who owed him deadliest wrong and abhorred in him deadliest guilt, yet who, for memories not wholly perished, could not yield him up unpitied to the dominion of evil, to the wreck of body and soul. He remembered all that this woman had endured through him; he remembered how by him shameful treachery had attainted the glorious morning of her youth; how by him shadows that could never wholly pass from her had been flung across the splendour of her womanhood.

"Stay, hear me a second,!* he said, with a gentler accent in the hesitation of the words. "You think I bear you no tenderness—I do, by Heaven I do, though often I come so near to hate you. If I had been at Antina, those brutes should never have touched you. Ever since I first heard of it, I have been seeking you. And it is in peril of my life I stay an hour in the kingdom; two