Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/193

182 within them, if not in the house itself; that she invited you to spend many hours alone with her in her Eastem hermitage, and so spent them that she found little difficulty in making you believe her all she would; that she then sought to throw you off by leaving you abruptly without any clue to her movements; and that when you persisted, against her wish, in seeking her, you found her, first the associate, and a little later the fellow-prisoner, with the men of that very party of extreme liberalists to whom you have always attributed the murderous onslaught made on you. These are your reasons for holding her innocent of all treason to you; they would not be very weighty evidences in law and in logic." As the chain of circumstances uncoiled link by link in the terse, unadorned words, it seemed to tighten in bands of iron about the heart of the man who trusted not less than he loved her. His face changed terribly as all the force of meaning and of circumstance allayed itself against her, and the vague doubts, that he had strangled in their birth as blasphemies against her, stood out in unveiled language. A dogged, savage, sullen darkness lowered on his features; it had never been on them before then; it was a ferocity wholly akin to his nature, hardened and embittered by the knowledge of his