Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/202

Rh reeks with infamy, and presses them on to crime.

"I will ask her," he said, hoarsely, while his lips were white and dry as dust. "Not to prove her purity, but to prove your shame."

Then, without another syllable, he turned and set his face southward, and went by great swift steps, that sank into the sand, backward to where he had left her—backward, with the Sicilian sea lying silent and untroubled by his course, and the sun rising higher from over the red wall of rock. Belief in what he had heard there was none, even yet, in his heart; off the brave allegiance of his rash nobility the evil fell, finding no grappling-place, no resting-lair; but on him a heavy, breathless, deadly oppression lay, and the first fear that his bold life had ever known ran like a current of ice through all his veins. The poison of doubt had been breathed on him, and its plague spot widened and deepened, let him rend the canker out as he would.

Once he stretched out his arms to the vacant air as he went on in his loneliness, as though he saw her beauty, and drew it to him, though death should come with it.

"Oh, my love, my love!" he muttered