Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/376

Rh woman whom they loved, as soldier and servant, noble and minstrel alike, loved Mary Stuart. The quiet was unbroken even by a loud-drawn breath; the sound of the flame consuming the lithe limbs of the wood was the only thing that stirred it. They waited for her judgment, and they had known that judgment inexorable as those given from the stone justice seat in the early ages of her own city of the Violet Crown. With his arms bound behind him, whilst they stood around him, ready to spring at a word upon him and sheathe their steel in his body with the fierce swift justice of the south, they held captive the man who had sold her to Giulio Villaflor.

To this end had his high ambitions come! He had known that, soon or late, his sin of treachery would surely find him out; would reach him though he were housed within kings' palaces; would strike him down even amidst those gods of gold and silver for which he had bartered his brethren. Yet the vengeance he had looked for had been the concrete vengeance, for his outraged oath, of his forsaken order; of that body politic to which he had sworn the secret vows of his implicit obedience; and even this vengeance, in the oversight of that intelligence which deems itself safe enough and sure enough to play with all, and remain true