Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/142

Rh without the judgment of any alien voice. To turn away and leave his enemy unaroused; to skulk and flee as though he were the evil-doer; to let the murderer lie there unawakened, unarrainged,—a deadlier thing than this she could not have demanded at his hands.

The sweetness of the day had died with the setting of the sun, and the darkness of night had fallen on their lives as on the earth where they dwelt. Silently they mounted, and passed away; silently they turned and looked backward with a long and lingering gaze at the forest roof, which well might prove their last refuge together, the last shelter in which they should ever dream of freedom and of a future. Then through the first shadows of evening, under the deep gloom of the woods, beside the melancholy moaning of the hidden river channels, they went onward in their flight from Church and King, onward to the sea, if they could ever reach the sweet fresh liberty of its wide waters.

And as they went—where the leafy depths enclosed, and the forest twilight hid them—the Greek rose slowly, with the heavy lethargy, and the weakness of overwrought fatigue still on him, like some fíerce yet timorous panther that has been