Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/255

244 sweetness of liberty and the liberty of love were hers.

But she thrust it from her: here she had no pity for herself, and here she had pity—exhaustless and filled with an unsparing self-reproach—for this man, who out of the very nobility of his soul, the very guilelessness of his trust, fell thus beneath her feet, and hung his life upon her. She had been merciless to others, devoting them to her need, breaking them through their own weakness, with the unpitying contempt and rigour of intellectual disdain and of sensuous allurement; here she was merciless to herself; here she bent, and broke, and cast away all her own life without pause or compassion. That which she had done to others she did also to herself. She unloosed herself from his hold, and looked at him with the cold, unnatural tranquillity which had had its terror even for the Greek.

"Who has called me a traitress?"

His eager eyes gazed down with imploring appeal into her own; the ardent fealty that would have disbelieved the voice of Heaven against her glowed through the heavy shadows of pain and dread upon his face.

"A traitor himself—a liar who shall eat his lie in the dust. God forgive me that I uttered the word