Moths by Ouida — page 185: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The words had filled the room with their sweet ineffable oaaiaek and had reached Vere and brought their confession to er. Her heart leaped like a bound thing set free; then a burning warmth that seemed to her like fire itself seemed to flood her veins. For-some way the great crowd parted, and she saw the face of Correze for a moment, and his eyes met hers. He had told his tale in the language he knew best and loved the most, The next‘he was lost in the midst of his worshipers, who vain- ly implored him to return and sing again. Vere, tutored by the world she lived in, sat quite still, and let her broad fan of white feathers lie motionless in her hands. ‘*Am I vile to have told her? Surely she must know it so well!” said Correze to himself, as he sent his horses away and walked through the streets of Paris in the chill mists that herald. ed daylight. ‘‘Am I vile to have told her? Will she ever look ‘at me again? Will she hate me forever? Will she understand? Perhaps not. I sing a.thousand songs; why should one have more meaning than another? She sees me play a hundred pas- sions on the stage: why should she believe I can feel one? And yet—and yet I think she will know, and perhaps she wil! not for- give; I fear she will never forgive.” He reproached himself bitterly as he walked home after mid- night through the throngs of the Boulevards. He said to himself that if he had not seen Sergius Zouroff entering Bignon’s he would never so far have broken his resolution and failed in his honor. He reached his home disturbed by apprehension and haunted with remorse. For an empire he would not have breathed a profane word in the ear of the woman who fulfilled his ideal of women, and he was afraid that he had insulted her. He did not go to his bed at all; he walked up and down his *ong suite of rooms in the intense scent of the hot-house bouquets which as usual covered every table and console in the chambers. For a fess declaration than that, he had seen great ladies glide qeiled through his doors; nay, they had come unasked. MOTHS ee But he knew very well that she would never come one step on the way to meet him, even if she understood. And that she would even understand he doubted. ' The morning rose, and the sun broke the mists, but its rays could not pierce through the olive velvet of his closed curtains. He walked to and fro restiessly through the artificial light and fragrance of hisrooms. If she had been like the others, if he had heard her step on the stair, if he had seen that proud head veiled in the mask of a shameful secrecy, what would he have felt?—he thought he would have felt the instant rapture, the endless despair, that men felt in the old days who sold their souls to hell; the rapture that lived an hour, the despair that en- dured an eternity. When he threw back his shutters and saw the brightness of morning, he rang and ordered his horse and rode out into the Bois without breaking his fast. The rides were all moist with the night’s rain; the boughs were all green with young leaf cS (ele) (eve) aa) (@ IC (oe) a" vs yey ht Vi