Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/336

Rh women like you, is to have the power to hate? Forgive? That were sweet as the touch of your kisses! It is to shun, to abhor, to resist you, that strength is needed!"

He was not wholly conscious of her presence; the sense that whilst she had betrayed she yet had borne him a cruel, worthless, sensual passion had been forced on him even whilst he had found her sheltering his foe, had been borne out by her own words, even by her outbreak of remorse, as she had pleaded for his life on the seashore; that sense remained with him, and against the weakness in him that made such a love even as this look priceless, strove that nobler instinct which had governed him when he had said to her, "love that is faithless and guilty,—what is that to me?" He had thought that, for her sake, he should shrink from no crime, that for the guerdon of her beauty there would be no guilt before which he would pause; but even now, in the semi-insanity brought on him by the torment through which he had passed, he was truer to himself than this, and the caress of a wanton could never have replaced to him the loss of the "one loyalty, one faith" of his life. He would have defended her and cleaved to her in her extremity; and endured in her stead for