Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/298

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290
IDALIA

"Revengeful? No. I do not think I am that; though one knows ill one's own errors. It is easy to forgive; we scorn where we pardon» but we pardon because we scorn."

She spoke musingly, with a grave and weary meditation as though memory, and not his words, usurped her: then, suddenly, she shook away any darker remembrance that dwelt with her, and turned full on him brilliant, penetrating eyes of half-contemptuous questioning.

"Some one of you it was who wrought that glorious piece of honest work in the Carpathians. You see, they were afraid that I should know their scheme: they stole out to do it in darkness; they thought that I should never learn it. But it all came to me; simply enough. I found their victim and saved him; and when Marc Lassla dragged himself half dying to my lodge in the mountains, and gasped us out a lame history of a bear-play, telling that young Vlistchnau lay dead in the woods from the brute's embrace, the whole was clear enough to me. The dying man's and the dead one's injuries were both no bear's wounds, but the fruit of pistol bullets; and though Lassla breathed his last in an hour or so, saying no more, I knew well enough that they had both been shot down by the Scot, and