Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/37

26 the love she had deemed dead in her heart, impossible to her nature; she, with whom love had been but the sceptre with which to sway slaves, the mandragora with which to blind madmen, the supreme foUy with which women, otherwise powerless, reach a power that mocks at kings and creeds, and reign over the broadest empire of earth.

She knelt by him, mute, motionless, with a terrible longing in the eyes that had never quailed under Giulio Villaflor's, and had made the Umbrian priest let fall the lash. In that moment, in the silence and the loneliness of the forest, where the shadows dosed above them, and in all the width of the land there was not one whom she could summon to his aid, one whom she dared trust with their Uves, the anguish she had oftentimes too mercilessly dealt, too lightly counted, recoiled back on her. She learned what it could be to bear, this thing that men call love, this deadly gambling of heart, and thought, and sense, which casts all stakes in fate upon the venture of another's life; she, who had watched that madness so often and so long, with calm, contemptuous gaze, and tempted youth, and manhood, and age into it with a sorceress' guile, heedíng the