Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/209

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"PASSION BORN OF A GLANCE!"
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think what it was to owe so great a gratitude to you, yet to be left in such strange ignorance of my preserver that, for anything which I could tell, we might never have met on earth?"

"I had reasons for desiring my own name untold," she answered, coldly, as though interrogation were unknown to her. "Besides I never thought that you would have any remembrance of me."

"To have lost remembrance I must have lost the life you rescued."

The brief words said a volume; she knew they were no offspring of hollow courtesy, but a passionate truth broken up unbidden from a character in which a bold and noble simplicity prevailed over all that the world had taught, in motive, in purpose, in action, and in speech; to understand her, might for years bewilder and mislead the man; to understand him, the few moments of that night sufficed to the woman.

"It is few remember as you do," she said, and the soft lingering richness of her voice, with an unspoken melancholy vibrating through it, thrilled through him. "Life is no great gift given back to merit gratitude! Bat, while we lose time in words, your murderer will escape; if you chased him to