Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/142

 creature, over the silent and lonesome plains. All that made this silence musical, this loneliness lovely to her, he did not see. When he saw the nocturnal plover winging his slow flight over the marsh, he only envied its power of motion; when he heard the great boar pushing its heavy body through the brakes of bay, he only fancied it was the tramp of some pursuing force.

The terror of that life was on him; he had been condemned to thirty years of the chain and the cell. If he were taken, the sentence would not be lessened; all his manhood would go away in agony, as the captive lion's does. When he should be set free, he would be old, grey-headed, miserable beyond compare; a childless and friendless outcast, to whom the unfamiliar world would be full of unknown faces, strange voices, alien ways, who would feel in his hideous loneliness that the galleys had been home.

'Take me back!' said the man who was let out of prison when he was seventy years old; to him the trodden bricks, the bare stone walls, the warder's round, the very chains and bars, were all he had of home.

'What would you do if they took me?' he asked her once.