Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/239

228 rumoured dishonour, and let the stain rest so that the world saw it as a reality; whilst she, knowing it false as foul, became too proud, too careless, and too callous to appeal against a world so credulous of evil, so incredulous of good, but took up in the haughty courage of an outraged dignity the outlawry which injustice contumeliously cast to her, and lived and fought, enjoyed and suffered, in grand contempt of all opinion, accepting as her sentence the yo contra todos, y todos contra yo, until such isolation and such contest became to her things of preference and triumph. He knew that he had done this guilt against her—partly in the cruelty of egotism that profited through her injury, partly in the blindness of partisanship that thought all means justified to secure its end, chiefly, beyond all, in a rankling jealousy of those possessions and that inheritance which had made her so rich in power and in gold, whilst he was penniless and an adventurer; jealousy that the lavishness of her gift, the generosity of her thought, never tempered, but inflamed. He knew that he had done this, and that of his own act he had turned the tenderness of her heart towards him into abhorrence, had changed the faith she had once borne him into the hatred of a proud woman for her oppressor, of a fearless temper for a