Moths by Ouida — page 328: what you’re looking at

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

324 MOTHS. He had been beside her, he whom an hour earlier she had longed for as an avenger, and she had driven him away. She had been true to the false; to the unfaithful, faithful. The man whose genius had been the one solace and pleasure of her life, whose beauty and whose.sympathy and whose chivalry were as a sorcery to her, who would have put his whole fate in her hands as he had put the myosotis, had been there beside her to do with as she chose, and she had sent him from) her. Her husband had said, ‘‘ Women are true till they are tempted.” She had been tempted, and had been strong—strung enough not even to say to him, ‘‘ Avenge me.” The sun had sunk low, the late day grew gray, the dusky sea ran swiftly and smoothly, soon the terraces and towers of Felicite rose in sight through the twilight mists. ‘The little children, tired and sleeping, lay curled quietly on their cushions at her feet; she felt weak and weary asit from some long combat, and her heart ached—ached for the pain she caused, the pain she bore, _ She stretched her hand over the rails and dropped the forget-me- nots in the fast-running sea. She would not keep a flower of his, now that she knew—— She saw the blue blossoms tossed for a moment on the water and then engulfed. ‘‘I donot want them,” she thought. ‘‘I shall never forget: it will be he who will forget.” For she thought so, with that humility of a lonely soul which is deemed so proud only because it 18 so sad. | He would go into the world, be the world’s idol, and forget. But she would remember till she died. And even at this cone sciousness a sense of guilt came over her, a sense of shame burned in her. She loved this man, who was not her husband—she, a wife. To her conscience and her honor, bothunworn and un- dulled, even so much as this seemed a treachery to her word and an uncleanliness. ‘‘Do IL grow like the others?” she mused, with a sort of horror at herself—the others, the women of her world, who made intrigues their daily bread. ‘Oh, my angel Raphael, you shall not fall, nor I!’ she murmured, half aloud, as the sea swept on its foam the little blue blossoms, and her eyes grew blind, and her heart grew faint. Fall into the slough of abandoned passions, into the dishonesty - of hidden loves, into the common, coarse cowardice of an impure secrecy? Ah, never, never! She felt cold, sick, weary, as she left the little road under the shadow of the walls of Felicite, and ascended the stone steps that mounted from the sea to the gar- den. But she moved firmly and with her head erect, Honor is an old-world thing; but it smells sweet to those in whose hand it is strong. _It was nearly nine; the shadows were dark; a low, pale-yellow line where the sun had gone down was all that was left of day. The little girls, sound asleep, were carried away from the boat by their women. The first gong was sounding that summoned the guests of the house to dinner. She was dressed quickly, and ‘went down to the drawing-rooms; there was a shade like a bruise comicbooks co