Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/57

46 hand softly over his forehead with a gesture that from her had deeper tenderness than far more passionate demonstrations from natures more yielding and less proud.

"What you have suffered for me!" she murmured. "What you have done and dared! You merít my whole life's dedication for such love—such service. And—that life is so little worthy of you."

The woman who so late had fronted Giulio Villa- flor with so superb a resistance, so defiant a disdain; the woman who had laughed at the threats and the prayers of her lovers, as of her foes. with so cold and so careless a contempt; the woman who had been tranquil before death, pitiless in power, victorious against outrage, and without mercy in fascination, felt abased, heart-stricken, smitten with a weary shame, before the loyal gaze of the man who held her life as the most valued and moat stainless gift the world could hold for him. To a nature integrally truthful and integrally noble, however warped by circumstance or error, the deadliest sting, the surest awakener of remorse, will always lie in the perfect faith of another's implicit confidence. Steeled to venom, careless of censure, and contemptuous of rebuke, it will bend, contrite and self-accursing, before the fidelity and clearness of one regard that vows a