Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/224

 that emotion absorbed into itself all weaker, slighter feelings, and made selfish dread impossible.

She was awed, but she was not afraid. She wished to help him as she had wished to help the driven boar at bay.

Her lustrous, unfathomable, star-like eyes looked up into his wild and sombre ones; they did not know one another, but each trusted the other after that one long look.

'Come,' she said simply, and struck inland.

The light was clear almost as the day; the pale, sad shores looked wan; the brown and shadowy moors had a mysterious, unearthly calm; the heat brooded on sea and earth like a cloud of pestilence slowly gathering its forces to destroy. From far off down the shore in the intense stillness there came a sound. It was the sound of the horses' feet of the carabineers: they were seeking the galley-slave.

He listened with pricked ears, and crouched, like the hunted fox; then he followed the child, their two shadows falling one on another in sable blackness on the pallor of the sand. Musa led him to the tomb of the Lucumo.