Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/69

58 of some mandragora-given dream. "Dishonour with you!—it were impossible. Ah God! why will you belie yourself with such self-condemnation?—you who are noblest among women—who chose death rather than that villain's touch?" "Hush! that was nothing. I should have been false indeed to all the traditions of my race if I had had fear of that moment's pang which the Fagan world held the signal of reléase—which Christians alone have raised into a gígantic nameless terror. But"—she drew herself from his arms as she spoke, and stood with the dignity that had awed even the ruthless Prelate, blent with an infinitely gentler sadness than had ever been upon her—"do not cheat yourself with thinking that I have no errors on me. I have grave ones, dark ones. In your sense, it is true, there is nothing to part us; but in my own conscience there is much to make me unfit for ever for such love as you bestow. See! I tell you that those men died at Antina through my work; I tell you that many more lives than theirs have been lost, sent to their graves by me; I tell you that I have made all men who fell beneath my sway serve me for one end, not a mean one, indeed, but one to which I sacrificed everything and every one ruthlessly, and did more ruin than you ever dream, or I