Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/53

42 many memories—memories which made it deadly to her pride to have bent thus to passion and to pity—memories which recalled to her that she had no right to bind in with her own the fate of one who brought to her the loyalty of perfect faith in her nature, the defencelessness of perfect ignorance of her past. She had done him evil enough; she had saved his life once, only to chain it so to hers that its doom must be whatever her own became; for her he had risked liberty, existence, everything save honour, ungrudgingly, and with the lavish largesse of a princely giver, who would have held no gift as any worth, no suffering as any sacrifice; now—at the last—she had surrendered her love to him, and listened to his own. She knew that there were thousands who would tell him that this was the darkest evil of all that, through her, had befallen him. And at her heart ached a burning, endless, futile pain, rather for him than for herself, though for herself there was sharp anguish in the knowledge that the world would tell him all love rendered from her could be but a graceful lie to fool him to his peril, an eloquent simulation to cheat him into misery, a mockery, hollow as it was beguiling, to draw him downward, Circe-like, to his destruction.

Her head was sunk on her hands; her thoughts