Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/162

Rh fold peril, from the Bourbon's grip, and from one surer still to know it and to strike."

"Surer? One does not live."

"Yes, one does; one that is ten thousand eyes and ears and lips incorporate, one that is thrice ten thousand intellects fused together, one that may strike me down from behind, and throw me like a dead dog into a wayside ditch, only for this, that I disobeyed and stayed in Naples to be near your prison."

She knew that the "many in one" he spoke of, the far-reaching invisible hand, the wide unerring prevision and condign vengeance that he dreaded, were those of the political society to which he had been bound in the early days of his manhood, when fretting poverty had goaded, restless intrigue had allured, and a warped yet at the first not ignoble love of freedom and of country had impelled him to its far-spread nets.

"You say this? So you also said, by all you held most sacred, that you had no share in and no knowledge of this attempted murder?"

She spoke slowly, and with icy chillness that cast back on him a hundred-fold more piercingly than by invective the thousand times of falsehood when