Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/246

Rh that whilst she thought they but allied her to those who suffered the martyrdom of liberators, who fought for the freedom of speech, and creed, and act, and who were banded together for the deliverance of enchained peoples, fettered her, she knew too late, into the power of one man, into the obedience of evil.

She had taken her oath to Conrad Phaulcon and to his cause, whilst in the splendour of her dreams and the ignorance of her gracious youth she had held the one a stainless patriot, the other a glorifíed martyrdom; she had been trepanned through the truest beauty of her nature, blinded through the purest desires of her heart. The patriot was a knave, but the more perilous because also a coward; the cause was a lie, but the more perilous because it stole, and draped itself in, the toga of Gracchus, the garb of an eternal truth. Slowly she had awakened to the sure agony through which all youth passes—the agony of disillusion. Slowly she had awakened to the knowledge that in giving herself to the service of liberty she had delivered herself into an unalterable thraldom; that the guide whom she had followed as she deemed to the fruition of idealised ambitions, and the attainment of a spotless fame, was but a false prophet