Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/310

Rh such stormy waters weighted with the fate of two lives! Then he went back to the work of the monastery, labouring all through the noon-heat among the sedges and the still, shallow, yellow lagunes—working as men only work when in that ardour of physical toil, that restless bodily exertion, they give vent to the thoughts which, if they paused to muse a moment, would unman and madden them.

He felt as if the hours would never move; the sun seemed to stand still; the blazing radiance of the day had a sickening oppression;—what might she not be bidden to suffer in it! He knew the temper of Giulio Villaflor, that leopard of the velvet skin and of the unsparing fangs. He shuddered as he looked on the rugged silent pile, that kept her chained for such a tyrant. He had never fancied that the world could hold such agony as those burning, endless, intolerable hours brought him, as he plunged down eagerly into the coolness of the waters to chill the torture in him, and laboured to kill thought under the burden of corporeal fatigue, under the fever of ceaseless activity.

The day grew on; noon came and passed; the glow of light lay clear and golden over the plains, and the breadth of the sheeted water; the hours