Moths by Ouida — page 362: what you’re looking at

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

grows big enough to know. You needn’t be afraid of me. & aren’t like you. I never shall be. There is something in the old countries; but I’ll be true to you, true as steel. Americans aren’t mean!” She paused once more, half afraid, in all her omnipotent vanity, of the answer she might receive. Vere was still silent. The grand pride natural to her was at war with the justice and generosity that were no less her nature, She was humiliated, yet she was deeply moved. This woman, whom she had always despised, had given her back kindness for unkindness, honor for scorn. With a frank and gracious gesture she rose and put out her hand to her cousin’s wife. ‘‘T thank you. I cannot accept your offer, but I thank you none the less. You revenge yourself very nobly; you rebuke me very generously. I see that in the past I did you wrong. I beg your pardon.” Into the radiant, bold eyes of Fuschia. Mull a cloud of sudden tears floated. She burst out crying. When she went away from Szarisla in the twilight of the sultry day she had failed to persuade Vere, yet she had had a victory. ‘‘You are a saint!” she said, passionately, as she stood on the threshold of Vere’s prison-house. ‘* You are a saint, and I shall tell all the world so. Will you give me some little thing of your own just to take home tomy boy from you? I shall have a kind of fancy as it will bring him a blessing. It’s nonsense, maybe, but still——” Vere gave her a silver cross. - The long, empty, colorless days went by in that terrible monotony which is a blank in all after-remembrance of it. Since the footsteps of Correze had passed away over the snow, asilence like death seemed to reign round her. She noticed little that was around her; she scarcely kept any count of the flight of time; it seemed to her that she had died when she had sent him from her to the world—the world that she would never revisit. For she knew her husband too well not to know that he would never change in the thing he demanded, and to purchase freedom by the humiliation of public tribunals was impossible to a woman reared in her childhood in the austere tenets of an uncompromis- ing honor, an unyielding pride. ‘‘T can live and die here,” she mused often. ‘* But I will never meet his mistress as my friend, and I will never sue forade . vorce.” When Sergius Zouroff from time to time wrote her brief words bidding her re-consider her choice, she did not consider for a moment; she tore up his message. The worst bitterness of life had passed her when she had bidden Correze depart from her. After that all seemed so easy, 80 _ trivial, so slight and poor. If her husband had sent her into poverty and made her work Na her hands for her bread, igs would have seemed no matter Cr. | comicbooks.co