Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/159

 What will you do, Febo, if they should take to offering rewards for whoever will tell of contraband goods run ashore to Maremma?'

She smiled slowly as she said it, and the old man winced.

'Hold your tongue,' he said angrily, 'and with these doganieri—burn them!—so near; are you mad? Come, let us go and find your pharmacy.'

She was free to go into the town, which to her seemed a large bewildering place, enclosed as it was between its stone fortifications and its sea-walls. She had never been there before, and she had the true mountain and moorland instincts of distrust and hatred for all places where men dwelt in numbers, cooped up in stone or brick compartments, and shut out by tiles and timber from the sight of the sky.

The men began to stare at her and make admiring jests; she pulled further over her head the woollen hood which Joconda had always enjoined on her to cover herself with if she went amidst a crowd; and laden with her goods she set to work to find out the pharmacy, and did find it in time, though with trouble.

It was a little dark vaulted place, made