Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/266

Rh through the stilly starlight, as one succeeded the other. It was tedious, arduous, wearying work; bringing so little recompense, needing such endless patience. Often the hound lost scent, and had to try back to where he had lost the sign of the wheels, as though it were the slot of a stag; often the dry crisp grasses or the baked white dust of the roads bore no scent at all, or the crossing and recrossing of other tracks blurred the marks and confused the trail; often the impress of a mule's hoofs or the heavy footprint of a contadina had struck out or overlaid the faint traces which only guided the dog. Often, also, for a priest, or a peasant party going to an infiorata, or, worse yet, for a set of soldiers scouring the country, he had to seek shelter in some dank dell of woodland, on some sandy pine-knoll, under the grey twisted olives, or beneath a tumble-down shed, and hide, as though he were himself the prisoner hunted, forcing Sulla to lie still beside him. But he had spent many a long day in the patient toil of deer-stalking in the Highlands at home, and he brought the same wariness and the same long endurance here. If he had once abandoned himself to the misery of thought, to the fierceness of vengeance, he could never have borne the intolerable slow-dragging bitterness of this