Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/203

192, in the longing of his soul. "What matter what you be, so you are mine!"

It was in the blindness of the senses that he spoke the mere idolatrous desire for the loveliness that to him had no likeness upon earth; the cruel, intoxicated, fiery riot of the "love, lithe and fierce" that counts no cost to itself or to its prey, and that would plunge into an eternity of pain to purchase one short hour of its joy. A moment, and the nobler emotion in him rose; the perfect faith, without which his one idolatry would be but brutalised abandonment, rebuked him; his head sank, his eyes saw the grey, glooming sea, through a hot rush of tears.

"God forgive me so much sin to her as lay in the mere thought!" he murmured as he went; to think that the lips which had lain on his had ever breathed the kisses which betray, to think that the heart which had beaten upon his had ever throbbed to the warmth of guilty pleasure, seemed to him a blasphemy against her that was sin itself. For, even though those lips should be his, even though that heart should beat for him, if there were past treachery or present infidelity in her life, she would be dead to him—dead, more cruelly than though the steel had pierced the fairness of her breast, and the golden trail of her hair been