Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/133

 things for him, but she did them as of yore they were done in Tempe, in Ilion, in Thessaly, in days when the Sun-god herded and ploughed for Admetus.

And all the while never once did it seem to cross her thoughts that she was a girl and he was a man.

He was weary, worn, full of care and fear; his senses were all absorbed in the one incessant carking anxiety lest his refuge should be found out, and his body, with a dead soul in it, killed by despair, dragged back to the hell of the galleys, As his ear was always strained for the least sound that should tell of his pursuers, so his whole nature and existence seemed to him bound up in that one terror of pursuit; the terror of the deer as he lies in the fern-brake, of the she-wolf as she hides with her cubs.

All other human instincts were momentarily suspended in him; all his being was absorbed into this one intense, overwhelming dread of his hunters and his doom.

'If I but once get free,' he thought, 'never, so help me God, will I hunt to death any poor forest thing again!'

But how was he to get free? This was not freedom, this hiding amidst tombs and