Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/52

Rh fearless intoxication of danger and of flight. It would not have been possible to her to do as many weaker and less truthful natures do—seek shelter in self-evasion, and turn the very nobility and trust of the man who loved her into the withes to bind him, and the band to blind him. It would not have been possible to her to stoop and touch his lips with hers, if on hers there were ever to be for him the shame of falsehood or the disgrace of subterfuge. When once she had answered him with that caress he prayed for, when once she had murmured to him, "I love you!" she had acknowledged to herself his right that there should never be one thing in her past or her present screened from him, one truth veiled, one act distorted. And on her, silence was bound; either way, withholding all or giving all the records of her past, she saw herself a traitress to her creed of truth and justice—a traitress alike to others and herself.

Lost in thought, and weakened now more than she knew by her captivity, by the scant coarse food and noxious air of her prison-house, and by the wild speed of the lengthened headlong midnight ride, she sat there in the still deep shadows of the oak glades, with the faint grey hue of the young day serving but to deepen into blacker sombreness the colonnades of trees. She had left him on the sudden sting of