Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/165

154 —to learn your fate, to find your enemies, and, in reward of that, saw you ten hours ago lavishing love upon your foreign favourite, on his heart, in his arms—you!"

"Well?"

She looked him full in the eyes still, with a deep and steady gaze; there was a firm, lowering gloom in her own, like the look which comes into the eyes of one who, brave and resolved, still counts the danger that lies before him, and finding it vast, yet resolves but the more fixedly to go through it.

"You did it maybe to dupe him?" he pursued, with the insolent riot of his silver-toned laughter, the louder because he had no belief in his own translation of her acts. "He had a strong arm to force back your gaol bars, and a wild brain to be lulled with your charming. You played the comedy with many—who so well?—was it but acted once again with him? You have done scores of daintier and more dangerous things, than so easy a victory as blinding and duping this mountain athlete, and you have fooled men for far less stakes than to free yourself from the gripe of our holy Monsignore. Tell me that was your project, and I will pardon it, though you blackened my name so heavily in the little melodrama. Was it? Yes, or no!"