Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/372

Rh seemed as though in that hour the courage of his Achæan fathers flowed into the veins that were fast changing to ice beneath the throes of dissolution.

"My life has disgraced you: my death will not," he said, as his heavy eyes were lifted to hers. "Can you forgive all?" "God is my witness,—all." "Ah, you were ever generous! Idalia"

And with her name thus latest upon his utterance, as it had been the latest utterance of so many, his head fell back upon her bosom, and through his parted lips the lingering breath came in one long deep-drawn sigh.

When that sigh ceased to quiver in the silence, he lay dead in the morning light.

The low dark entrance had filled in that moment with armed men; their weapons dropped blood, their faces were hot with the heat of war and of victory, their passions were at white heat with the madness of joy; they were of that nature which long before showed its southern grandeur in the midnight charge of the Aurelian trench, and made the five hundred of the Legion pierce their way through the dense and hostile host at Mazzarene. At their head was the young boy Berto; all his slender limbs qiüvering with the glory of triumph, and his