Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/98

Rh the last to you. Well, it was these two dissimilar lives that made me what I am. I was happy then in both; happy, dreaming in poverty in Greece; happy, dreaming in magnificence in Roumelia; ambitious already, ambitious as any Cæsar in both. In Athens I had the poetry and the purity of glory in me; in Turkey its power and its pomp allured me. Both, combined with the knowledge of my past heritage in Hellenic fame, and of my future heritage in the Vassalis dominion, gave me the pride of an emperor and the vision of an empire wide as the world. Ah Heaven! yet the dreams were pure, too—purer and loftier than anything that life can realise. For I did not dream for myself alone. I dreamed of peoples liberated, of dynasties bound together by love of the common good, of the Free Republics revived by my hand, and shedding light in all dark places where creeds reigned and superstitions crouched, of misery banished, of age revered, of every slavery of custom broken, of every nobler instinct followed, of men made brethren, and not beasts of prey who hunt down and devour the young, the weak, the guiltless. Ah Heaven! what dreams they were."

Her head sunk, her eyes were fixed on the flood of light without, her thoughts were far from him,