Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/227

216 he had goaded and trepanned, and injured, through the length of many years. Some touch of love for her ever lingered in him.

He paused a while, at some distance from her. She never noted him; her eyes, without sight in them, gazed at the dusky changing mass of water that here and there beneath the spell of waking light broke into melting lustrous hues, like the gleam of colours on a southern bird's bright throat.

He drew closer at last, with hesitation.

"You will come with me, then?"

She gave no sign even that she heard the words.

"I am not alone," he pursued. "Lousada, Veni, and the boy Berto sought you. I fell in with them as I neared here; they are fugitives, and proscribed themselves; they lie hid by day in an old sea-den of Veni's; they look to get away by the coast in a night or so; they would give their bodies to shot and sabre to save your hand from a rough touch. Will you come to them?"

He could not tell whether she heeded him; he saw her face in profíle; it was still, cold, passionless, stem with a mute intolerable suffering, like some Greek head, in stone, of Destiny.