Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/204

Rh drawn through the trampled dust of blood-stained streets.

If truth abode not with her, and the fealty of honour, she was dead to him.

"If her eyes shrink from mine, let the seas cover me!" he prayed in his soul; and the length of the shore seemed endless to him, and the tawny stretch of the beach to be the waste of a desert, and the surf, as it flowed up and broke at his feet, to force his steps backward and backward, and to bind his limbs as with lead.

For many moments the man who had tortured him stood motionless, following with his gaze the retreating shadow. The grave patience, the genile tranquillity, the subdued regret his features had worn throughout their interview, passed away; a thousand emotions, a thousand shades of thought, of feeling, and of suffering, swept over them; alone there, with no living thing near him save the white gulls resting on the curl of the waves, he had no need to wear a mask, and he endured as sharp a misery as any he had dealt.

The deadliest pang in it was shame; the carking jealous, bitter shame that where he had failed another should have won; the knowledge that the