Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/189

178 can summon round her none but men, and those men adventurers or conspirators; who shelters your assassin in her Turkísh gardens, yet affects all ignorance of his identity or vicinage; and who, driven at last to speak of him, tells you he is her foe, yet omits altogether to explain why, if so, she has so long shielded him from your discovery and the law's justice. You love, and therefore you are blind. Yet is it possible that even that blindness can be so utterly dark that you have never remembered all these things?"

The black blood gathered in his listener's face; he kept his passions down, because, for her sake, he held it best to hear all her calumniator would bring against her; but they well-nigh mastered him, rising the darker and the stronger for the keen pang of truth that every shaft of the abhorred words stung him with—truth that she had herself placed it beyond his power to refute.

"Go on," he said, simply. "You called yourself her friend, I think?"

The rebuke was bitter, yet it did not move the man it lashed.

"Scarcely so much," he returned, quietly. "Her acquaintance—indeed, her associate in not a few political matters—but scarcely her friend. Miladi's