Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/182

Rh forget my words if they did you an injury. They were spoken in passion and haste."

For the moment the words touched his hearer—awoke something of shame, something of admiration, something of compassion, that had no scorn in it, but a dim instinct of honour for this noble madness that believed in him, for this self-rebuke that was spoken so generously, content to take blame rather than to hold to an unjustified suspicion. All the cruelty of jealousy, all the pitilessness of hatred, all the unmerciful heartlessness of craft, were in him against the man whom he instinctively knew that the woman he coveted loved. Yet they were for an instant stilled under the vague emotion that woke in him—that emotion of involuntary homage which even the shallowest and the basest natures will at times yield reluctantly to the greatness of a brave sincerity.

But it was very fleeting with him; too fleeting to change the hard set purpose that had possessed him from the moment when his knowledge of his rival's temper had made him at once divine who had been the deliverer of their mistress, and had sent him seaward to trust to hazard for the accident that should bring him across the fugitive's path.

He stretched his hand out with frank grace.