Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/238

of the man who would return to find her lost once more—the man she must forsake or must betray; whose body she must give to slaughter, or whose soul she must slay by abandonment. She looked down into the fantastic flicker of the resinous boughs as she had looked down into the ripple of the waters; and, as he watched her, the same shame which had moved him for his sins to her, when he heard of her as within the power of Giulio Villaflor, stirred in her companion: it ever slumbered in him; at times it woke and stung him, yet it never stayed him from his sacrifice of her to the needs of his own craft, the lusts of his own avarice. To serve himself, he had warped and misled the idealic ambitions, the fearless genius, the poet's faith, the hero's visions, that he had found in her in her earliest youth; to serve himself, he had taught the keenness of her intellect intrigue, fanned her worship of freedom into recklessness, snared her to evil through the noblest passions that beat in her, taught her to hold her beauty as a mask, a weapon, a lure, a purchase-coin; to serve himself, he had roused her bravery into defiance, her pride into unmerciful scorn, her wit into sceptic cruelty, and—when these were done—had gone further, and soiled the fairness of her life with the dusky imperishable stain of lip