Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/49

38 had told herself that she had no title to, no fitness for, a noble and unsullied homage.

Where she leaned now against the ruined altar-stones, remorse, keen as though their love were guilt, weighed on her. He had justly won his right to all of joy, of honour, and of peace, that she could give the liberator and defender of her life; he had been willing to purchase liberty for her at loss of all things to himself; he had meríted the tenderness she had yielded to him by service which no gratitude rendered could repay:—and she knew that, in all likelihood, the sole reward her love would bring to him would be a violent death by shot or steel: a fate as merciless as the blow his Abruzzian foe had dealt at him that night. An exceeding bitterness came on her—a heart-sickness of regret. Why had not he come to her in the early years of her youth? Why had not this thing, since at last it reached her, been wakened in her while yet it would have sufficed to her, while yet it would have had no shadow cast upon it from the past, while yet no self-reproach, no weariness of doubt, no fever of reckless ambition, and no darkness of untold bondage, of fettered action, of dead memories, would have stretched between them? The poignancy of that cruel remembrance, "too late," which had passed over her when she had