Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/59

48 "You ask it? Do you not know that I feel mad with the mere licence only to touch your hand with mine? And—what insult do you think that I can dare to offer you!" "None."

She looked at him full in the eyes, with a tenderness infínitely melancholy, a gaze intense in its calm unspoken thought.

"Then why"

She smiled slightly, with something of her old delicate irony, her own contemptuous, unsparing cynicism, which never was more unsparing than to herself.

"Why? Well,—you may have heard that I have no great belief in marriage, and little favour for it; and the answer was not sure, or would not have been, rather, if you were as other men. What do you know of me? Where have you lived, if you have not heard my name coupled with evil? Why should you deem so much scruple needful with a woman whom you found a conspirator in chains—a prisoner, degraded to the mercy of Monsignore Villaflor?"

A great darkness swept over her face as, she spoke her persecutor's name, though through the bitterness and mournfulness of all her speech there ran the