Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/357

 repentance of a generous temper. She had gone through the world with but little heed for the pain of others; but his pain smote her conscience. After all, he had a title to upbraid her passionately; that he refrained from doing so made her own self-reproach the keener. There had been so many moments when with justice he might have felt certain that she loved him: and how could he guess the rest? She knew that she had wronged him; and she was humbled in her own sight; she had lost her own self-respect, and her own motives seemed to her but poor, and almost base.

No amorous entreaty, no feverish pursuit of her, had ever moved her so intensely as that silent condemnation, as that contemptuous rejection, of her poor half-hearted overture of peace.

When she left the chapel she loved him as she had never done before; yet it never occurred to her to abandon her riches for his sake. The habits and the ways of the world were too close about her; its artificial needs and imperious demands were too entirely her second nature; its