Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/127

116 your will!—no curb shall ever touch you, no spur shall ever gall you!"

As she caressed the hunter, the hound at her side dropped his muzzle earthward with a low smothered growl, then lifted his head and looked at her with anxious, eager questions in his imploring eyes.

"The dog scents some danger. What is it, Sulla?" she asked, giving him that sign of silence which the animal had learned so well. "A wolf, maybe. We will unearth him if he be anything worse," said Erceldoune, as he swept back with one arm the heavy boughs, while with his right hand he loosened the pistol from his sash. The rocks sloped sharply down; the sunset light shone on the dell beneath as he bent forward.

A cry broke from him, loud, wild, exultant as the cry of the eagle swooping to its prey. With one hand still holding upward the matted veil of foliage, he stood rooted there, all the worst passions of his nature roused in an instant into deadliest strength.

There, almost at his feet, far beneath in the curved hollow of a moss-grown, cup-shaped dell, sleeping as he himself had slept on the Capriote shore at his foe's mercy, with one arm beneath his head and the