Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/378

Rh with that gulf of fire and of shadow parting them, the gaze of Idalia rested on him.

At her side Erceldoune stood. His head was bent, his eyes were on the ground, and his arms were folded on his breast; he knew that if he looked up or unloosed his hand, he should break the word that he had passed to leave their vengeance with her, he should forestall the death-stroke that the soldiers of the Revolution waited there to strike. She faced them in the hush of the silence; so intense that through the cavern the far-off chiming of the waters on the shore could be fainly heard. The warm glow of the pine-flames, like the red sun that burns on the Nile, fell about her in a splendour of hot tawny gold. Her eyes were dark and dreaming, as with the memories and secrets of innumerable ages, like the unfathomable lustre of the eyes that poets give to Cleopatra; her mouth was grave and weary as with the langour of past and deadly pain; her brow was in shadow, as though the shade of the thorn-crown of those who suffer for the people still was there, yet on her face there was a light beyond that which the burning sea-pines shed; it was the light of the dawn of freedom.

She never spoke; but her gaze rested on the man who had betrayed her into captivity—who had