Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/311

300 that vibration in her voice that scared them like startled sheep. "He dies there, and you have not mercy enough even to lift him up one drop of water. If you are men, and not fiends, unloose him!"

They had been as fiends in their sport; the southern cruelty that will rend a bird's wings from its body, or a butterfly's dainty beauty asunder, laughing softly all the while, had been awakened in them; they were loath to quit its indulgence.

He looked as though she said aright, and that he was dying lashed there to the column; his eyes were blood-red, his mouth open and swollen, his forehead pui"ple with suffused blood; his heart beat visibly, great slow laboured throbs, under the cords.

She wrenched herself from their hold, and caught the wooden cup the soldier had cast down, and filled it with the water of the stagnant stream, and held it upward to his lips. He quivered from head to foot, and shrank from the draught that through the parching heat he had been athirst for with so deadly a longing.

"Do not torture me—more?"

The whisper was almost inarticulate from his dry stiffened lips: the cup fell from her hold. She knew his meaning; she remembered the memory which made the thirst that he endured more