Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/367

356 your sin—if you would redeem your infamy—if you have ever known remorse—bear me witness what you are to me!" The evil faded off his face; a softer look came back there.

"Late—late—late!" he sighed: yet he lifted his head and made the sign of the cross with that latent superstition which lingered in him even whilst he made reckiess jest of Deity, and denied with flippant laughter man's dreaming hope of God.

"By her mother's memory I swear,—Idalia Vassalis is my daughter. To her most bitter calamity. Those who have spoken evil against her have lied. I have been a coward, a traitor, a shame, and a darkness for ever on her path ; but—she has ever been loyal to me. She never feared, and she was never faithless; I loved her for that; but,—for that too,—I hated her."

As the words, more vivid in the southern tongue he used, left his lips firmly and distinctly, her eyes filled slowly with tears, and across the stricken form of the wounded man, met those which had seen her aright through all the mists of calumny, which had looked down through the shadows of doubt, and read, despite them, the veiled truth of