sweetness of a cheated hope, to end in lifelong desolation, like that which had to-night risen before her, and arraigned her for its ruin.
"Most men in their passion love but their own indulgence; but now and then there are those who love us for ourselves; they should be spared," she thought, still standing, her face turned once more towards the sea.
They called her unscrupulous, she had been so; they called her heartless, merciless, remorseless, in all her poetic beauty; there had been too much truth in the charge; much error lay on her life, great ruin at her door; but of what this woman really was her foes knew nothing, and her lovers knew as little. With neither was she ever what she now was, looking on the white gleam of the surf where it broke up on the sands below—now, when she was musing how to save again, from herself, him whom she had once saved from the grave.
In the break of the morning Idalia rose; and thrusting back the green lattice of her casement glanced outward at the east. The loose silken folds of a Turkish robe floated round her, her face was pale with a dark shadow beneath the eyes, and her hair lay in long loose masses on her shoulders, now and then lifted by the wind. She was thinking
