Moths by Ouida — page 326: what you’re looking at

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

= RN ae MOTHS. the people themselves would never have attempted; where the face of the dark stone was a sheer declivity, broken into sharp peaks and rough bastions, on which there seemed scarce a ledge for a sea-bird to perch on. Correze was descending with the gure foot that in his boyhood had let him chase the ibex and the boudequin of the Alps of Dauphine and Savoy, and had let him in later years hunt the steinbock of Styria and Carinthia in its highest haunts. Vere, risen to her feet, stood like the fisherman gazing upward, She was like stone herself; she ‘neither moved nor cried out; she scarcely breathed. Sie looked upward, and iz. ose few moments all the horrors of death passed over her. Was it an instant, or an hour? Sheneverknew. One moment he was in the air, hanging as the birds hang to the face of the cliff, beneath him only the jagged points and buts of a thousand innacles of rock; the next he stood before her, baving dropped ightly and easily on the sands, while the peasant, gasping, mut- tered his paternostersin incoherent awe. Correze was very pale, and his lips trembled a little; but it was not the perilous descent of the rocks that had shaken him, it was the look which he saw on her face. If he had dared, nay, had she been any other woman, he would have said, ‘‘ You cannot deny it now; you love me.” Their eyes met as they stood together on the same coast where they had first seen each other, when he was gay and without sorrow as she was a child. They knew ,then that they loved each other, as they had not known it when he had sung in the Paris salon— ‘* Si vous saviez que je vous aime, Surtout si yous saviez comment—’’ For between them there then had been doubt, hesitation, offense, uncertainty; but now the great truth was bare to them both, and neither dreamed of denying it. Yet he only said, as he uncovered his head, ‘‘ Forgive me, ‘princess; I fear I startled you.” “You startled me,” she answered, mechanically. ‘*‘ Why run such a frightful danger ?”’ ‘It is none tome. The rocks are safer than the ice walls. I was above, and I saw you; there was no other way.” The fisher had shouldered his creel and was trudging home- ward. He paused abruptly. He stood before her, still barehead- ed. He was very pale. Without being conscious what she did, she had seated herself again on the ledge of slate, the sea and the shore blended dizzily before her eyes. Correze watched her anxiously, pitifully. His courage failed - He was afzaid of this woman, whom he loved--he who had been always in love victorious. ** Have I displeased you?’ he murmured, humbly. ‘‘1 have come straight from Norway. I thought I might take one hour on this coast before going to Paris. I heard that you were here. § have been an exile many months——” | ! comicbooks.co