Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/245

234 courage, her genius, her instinct, her prowess had borne her out, even when at loss and with sacrifice, unscathed and unconquered; here at last no one of these availed her, but she was bound, powerless and paralysed, under the net of circumstance. Before this she had never been vanquished, now she was chained down beyond escape beneath the weight of an intolerable oppression.

The pine-ember's glowing crimson on the grey ash dust seemed to stand out like letters of flame-writing of fire that glowed around upon the blackness of the shadows, and seemed as though it repeated in a thousand shapes the words that had fettered all her life. Words uttered so long ago under the great dim oak glades of Greece, while the stars burned down, through the solemn woods, and the moan of classic waters stole through the stillness of the night. Words that she had thought bound her by holy withes to noble thoughts, to sacred aims, to patriot souls, to the ransom of the nations, to the armies of the truth. Words pledged with a child's faith, with a poet's enthusiasm, with a visionary's hope, with the all-belief of youth, and with the glow of ambitions too high for earth, too proud for heaven. Words dictated by lips that she had trusted then as though an angel's bidding spoke by them. Words