Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/226

Rh and of fearless aims; you now show me, in the one redemption of my life—the one purer, bettar, higher thing!—only an added guilt, a fresh dishonour. I lose all through you. Are you not content?"

The vivid passion, the agonised irony, died suddenly, as a flame drops to the ground; her head fell, her limbs sank wearily on the broken rocks, a dull apathy retumed on her, in which she lost all memory, even of his presence. He looked at her, hushed, awed, moved to something that was almost dread of his own work, intimidated by the suddenness and the completeness of his own victory; he waited, hesitating, and as one afraid, some moments; she gave no sign that she even remembered he was near; every second wasted might cost them both the loss of liberty, if not of life; but he lacked the boldness that could have pressed on her then the question of mere bodily danger, the mere physical perils from the cell and the rods of her persecutors. There was that in her attitude, as she sat, with the loosened weight of her hair sweeping down into the salt pools of the beach, and an icy calm on the colourless immutability of her features, that subdued and shamed him.

Some sense of reluctant reverential fear was always on him for the woman whom, nevertheless,