Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/191

180 The tale bad too cióse a likeness with her own self-accusing confession, her own keenness of remorse, not to bear a burden of possibility with it—a hideous surface of truth which made it impossible it should be cast away as calumny. Yet through the dizzy misery that came upon him he grasped one thought still foremost of all—to defend her.

"Is that all you stayed me to tell?" he asked. "It was not worth your while. I have no heed for libels."

"It is not all. I know well that my words are wasted, and that you think me a slanderer for them: that is a matter of course. Hugo thought me the same when I told him what the tenderness of his imperial mistress would prove worth. I will not strain your patience longer; let us keep close to one fact—the attempt upon your life. You deny the association of Idalia Vassalis with that crime?"

"I deny it— utterly."

His voice had a harsh vibration in it like the tone of one who speaks under unbearable physical suffering. He denied it in her name; but whilst he did so there ate like fire into him the remembrance of that horror, that remorse, that passion, with which she had looked upon the Greek, and held him from his vengeance. With his last breath he would have