Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/211

200 chest rose and fell with a single voiceless sob. He only remembered that revenge was valueless, since revenge could not bring him the lips that he longed for, the beauty that he desired as the ice-bound earth desires summer.

Valueless?—yet not so. It could not give her to him, but it could withhold her from any other.

A young, shy, gentle, little sea-bird, whose wings as yet could scarcely bear it, rose at his feet as he mused, and fluttered a hand's breadth, and then trembled and fell, panting and glancing up with its bright, dove-like, brown eye. He took it savagely and wrung the slender snowy throat, and flung it out on to the crest of a breaker—dead. He had never before been cruel to birds or beasts; such fierce and wanton slaughter was not natural to him, but in this moment it had a horrible pleasure in its brutality. He had subdued all his impulses of hate so long, it sated them, if ever so slightly, to wreak them on that innocent thing. He had seen the dying eyes glaze and fill with misty fear with a gladness he would have believed impossible; he wanted to see hers fade out thus; to stand by and see them fade with just that look of terror and of helplessness;—eyes that had given such smiling scorn to him, such passionate eloquence to others.