Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/264

Rh them, yet had so far too much of suffering to be the cruel, wanton, voluntary guilt of such a woman as her calumniator had declared her to be—to be guilt, sensual, tyrannous, and self-chosen.

He stooped to her, and his voice was so low that it was hardly heard above the beatings of his heart.

"I cannot tell; is it—not justice that you need, but pardon?"

She answered him nothing where she had sunk in that abandonment. The nobler his pardon, the darker was the wrong against him. She could have kissed his feet, and cried out to him for forgiveness, as though her own hand had done that murderous iniquity against him. She could better have borne his curse than she could bear his tenderness. He touched her; his hand shook like a leaf. "Is it so? I can bear to know you are human by error; you shall be but dearer to me for the truth with which you redeem it."

She looked at him with a swift sudden movement that raised the full beauty of her face upward in the tawny flame-light; it was colourless, and líned with the marks of the damp stones, and had all its proud glory soiled and dimmed, yet it had the grandeur of an intense sacrifice, of an intense passion, in it.

"Ah, you are just and pitiful as a god! Give no