Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/143

 'They should not take us alive,' she said; and he did not notice how she had identified his fate with her own.

That day she cleaned and burnished and gave a sharper edge to his dagger, and to the long slender stiletto that she always wore inside her girdle.

'It is all we have,' she said sorrowfully, thinking of the rifles of the hunters and the carbines of the guards.

Este shuddered.

He recalled the ghastly struggle of unarmed men with full-armed foes, the horrors of that night of insurrection when blood had run like water, and the flash of musketry had blazed through the darkness, and alone he and Saturnino had dropped into the sea, stunned by the blow that water can give a falling man, and long pursued by the roar of the guns of the fort booming dully through the night.

She did not know what such scenes were, but he knew, and he sickened at the memory of them; his nature had made him for languor, rest, and love, not combat; and he knew that when men wish to die they never can.

With a passion that was almost madness,