Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/244

Rh on the thick soft lichens covering the tower stones, close beside the mouth of the shaft, up which every faintest sound from the hollow den below came to him as distinct upon the rarifíed air as up the passage of an auricular tube.

Alone, by the blazing tumbled heap of pine wood, her attitude never changed; the light played on the metal of the rifle, in the red-brown of the hound's eyes, on the scarlet and the gold of her soiled and torn masque dress; beyond, on every side, stretched the dense Rembrandt shade of the vault; her eyes never stirred from the one spot in the embers, which they looked at without knowing what they saw.

"It is but just," she thought, with that stern, unsparing, self-judgment which was strong in her, as her disdain was strong for the judgments of the world. "I never paused for any destruction; it is but just that I must destroy the only life I prize."

And as she thought her eyes filled with a great misery; justice on herself it might be, but how unjust upon the guiltless!—upon this man who spent his heart, his honour, his very existence on her, only by her to be betrayed or be forsaken.

Through all the varied dangers of her past, her