Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/67

56 He had never heard the last words; the first sufficed to make the wild joy course like fire through his veins, to light the future with the glory of unutterable gladness, to give her to him then and for ever; his own, let all the earth stand against them, or let her own will forbid him her beauty and her tenderness as she would. The one agonised dread that had stifled him as with a hand of ice through the last moments was gone; he feared no other thing—not even death, since if that smote her it should stríke him with the same blow.

He would not release her from his embrace; he held her there, with the loosened trail of her hair floating over his chest and his ceaseless kisses on her lips; he forgot that every hour of their lives might be numbered, that they had just broken from a prison that might yawn afresh for them, and enclose them beyond hope ere even another day had passed; that he knew no more of her past now than he had known when first her hand had held the curled leaf filled with water to his parching lips in the Carpathian woods; he heeded nothing, remembered nothing, asked nothing, since her eyes had told him more surely yet than her words that no shame rested on her to divorce her in the sole sense in which he would accept shame to have the power to