Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/316

Rh It was the sole denial, the sole evasión of the truth that ever his voice had spoken. To save himself, he would not have borrowed the faintest likeness of a lie; but in the dizzy mists of his reeling senses this one instinct remained with him—to save her even from herself, to screen her even from the justice that would avenge him.

As she heard, where she stood bound, held back by the guards who had seized her, her eyes met his;—guilty or guiltless, faithful or faithless, by that look he knew that she loved him as no woman will love twice.

His head sank, his eyelids closed, he shivered in the scorching day. She loved him, or she had not come thither; she loved him, or never that language had burned for him in her glance. But this love—love of the traitress, of the voluptuous betrayer, of the temptress of sin, of the "queen of evil, lady of lust,"—what was this to him?

Some touch of veneration for the courage they had witnessed, for the self-sacrifice they vaguely understood, had come upon the brígands round him—brigands in their coarseness, their training, and their brutality, though they wore the livery of a monarchy. They had seen that this man could hold his own in contest with the strength, and the rage,