Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/286

Rh of no fatigue, sensible of no pain; he worked for her, and on him her eyes might rest from her prison-chamber. It gave him a Samson's force, an Indian's patience. Wading knee deep through the pools, he stretched his nets across the head of the water, as he had known the poachers to do many a night across the weir of Highland rivers. Afraid of wasting such powder and shot as he had with him, he made a sling from a strip of his sash, and slew with unerring aim the wild teal that flocked among the osiers, till they were flung in scores to the arid banks. He mowed down the reeds where the fish-destroying birds were sheltered, so that they should haunt the monastery waters no more, and bore the rushes in great sheaves to land. He laboured without rest, and doing the work of twenty men, in the full downpour of the vertical heat, and all through the length of the day, while his friend the Umbrian brother sat luxuriously, with folded hands, staring at him like an owl lazily blinking in the sunlight.

He laboured without ceasing, and with a hot joy at his heart; afar, where the grey walls towered, the eyes of Idalia watched him, and with sunset he would have earned the right to sleep under the roof that made her prison. It sufficed, with his high