Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/240

Rh coward, of a slandered honour for its traitor and its traducer. He knew that long before, in those bygone years when he had crowned her young head with the wild laurel-leaves of Livada, and wooed her with subtle words to the Delphian laurels of a perilous strife and a perilous fame, the Greek child had fastened her deep eyes on him as though he were a god, and believed in him as though the voice of Delphos spoke in his; and he knew that of his own act he had made the woman on whom he looked now, in the dusky ruby heat of the uncertain flame, scorn him with all the force of her imperious intellect, and alone withhold her lips from curses on him as the ruin of her life, because memories that he had outraged had still their sanctity for her—because to the oaths that he had broken she yet had remained faithful.

It had been wanton destruction he had wrought, it was irrevocable loss he had sustained; some sense of all he had forfeited and killed when he had become her worst traitor, and had made the eyes that once sought his in love cast on him their righteous scorn, smote him heavily and restlessly now, as they sat, with the burning of the watch-fire between them, alone in the cavernous gloom. In the whiteness and the immutability of her face there was a grandeur