Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/232



let the blade slide back into its case.

"That is well," he said, simply, while the radiance of his conquest played all over his arched lips and his fair brow; then, without other words, he took his way across the stretch of sands, and many yards onward swept back a deep screen of ivy and acanthus that closed the mouth of a fissure in the rocks, and veiled it so darkly that no sign of the break in the great mass of stone was seen. He signed to her to enter: she obeyed him; having once made her election, it was not in her afterwards to pause, to waver, to retract; having submitted herself to his power for another's sake, she ceased to protest against that power's use. The screen of matted foliage fell behind her, shutting out the day; before her stretched the gloom of a long narrow arching passage-way, hollowed through the thickness of the cliff, half sea