Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/152

 fleet as the roebuck's and had been as free.

She walked on rapidly, and sorely tempted to turn aside into many a leafy defile she knew of, where the hill-hare made its form, to pause beside many a sedge-rimmed shallow where the sultan-hen was splashing. But she resisted the longing to revisit all those beloved haunts that she shared with the winged and the four-footed peoples. She held on straight across the narrow dangerous paths that intersected the marshes, and the cattle-tracks that led through the mazes of underwood, and after some hours of incessant motion she saw the castle on its headland that marked Telamone. Another hour brought her to its desolate beach, where the ruins of many a Roman villa divide the sand with the stunted aloes and the glazier's weed.

It is a dreary, dirty, miserable place, though in other ages it was decked with the snowy marbles of patrician palaces, and bore, on its then deep waters, the gilded pleasure-galleys of the great Romans.

Here she tried in vain to sell what she had brought; the few people were too poor