Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/285

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FAIRY-GOLD.
277

o£ a superb pride was on her brow—it seemed Aspasia who lived again, and who remembered Pender

He looked on her, with the glow of passion on his face, made nobler by the poet's thoughts that were awaking in him. He was silent, for his heart was lulled with the oppression of his love, as the great forests are silenced before the storm.

She had forgotten his presence, standing there in the hush of the midnight, with the Byzantine city to the eastward, and to the west the land that had heard Plato—her thoughts were far away among the shadows of the past, the great past, when the Io Triumphe had been echoed up to the dim majesty of the Acropolis, and the roses had drooped their fragrant heads on the gracious gold of Alcibiades' love-locks.

He knew that he was forgotten, yet his heart did not reproach her; she was far above him in his sight, far as the stars that shone now above Athens, and his love was one that would take neglect and anguish silently, without swerving once from its loyalty. He would have laid his life down to be pressed out in agony, so that it should have given her one passing moment of pleasure, as a rose is thrown under a woman's foot to be crushed as she