Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/344

Rh she moaned. "You have been martyred for me. Through me you will perish!"

He smiled, as men smile in some sweet fancy of dreaming sleep.

"Though I may die with the dawn, I can thank God now I have lived."

"Lived to be cursed by me!"

"Lived to be loved by you;—it is enough."

"Loved by a love that destroys you! Can you ever forgive?"

"Forgive ? What is left to forgive, since you are mine?" "Yours—for your ruin, your torture, your slaughter! These are the love-gifts I bring you!" "Think not of them! Lift your lips to mine, and they are forgotten "

His thoughts held no other thing, his consciousness grasped no other reality, than this one living priceless surety of her, that came home to his heart, beyond doubt, beyond suspicion, with all the divine force of a resistless truth. Memories of evil and of crime floated, shapeless, amidst the sudden glory that seemed to fill the gloom of his midnight prison with the glow of a southern dawn: he let them pass,—he could not hold them. She unloosed herself from his arms, and knelt once more beside him, so that, in