Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/335

324 "Hush! hush! Ah! for Heaven's sake, believe my love at least, though it has cursed you!" He thrust her from him, with the senseless blaze still in his eyes.

"Love! Ay, shared with a score. Love that is poison and infamy; love in my arms to-night, in another's to-morrow! Oh, I know, I know,—it is sweet, and cruel, and rich, and men fall by it and perish through it. But to me it were worse than nought. Can you not tell how I loved her?" The words which had been at first raving and violent sank at last into an infinite weariness and pathos. Tears rained down her face as she heard them; never had she honoured him as she honoured him now, when he refused subjection to a vile passion, and held her dead to him because he held her base with the baseness of delibérate and self-chosen vice.

"I can tell!" she murmured. "You love as she merits not, nor any woman. Yet, love further still, and, if you can, forgive!"

He started as the voice thrilled through him, and roused his consciousness of some actual life near him. "Forgive? forgive?" he answered her. "Do you not know that what men have to pray for, before