Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/203

 Saturnino lapsed into the sullen silence he had preserved since his capture.

'I will see you again,' murmured the Sicilian, and for prudence sake he left the sea-wall and went towards the town to summon those of his sailors who were drinking and domino-playing at the wine-houses.

To do what the galley-slave asked him might be utter ruin and disgrace to him; it might cost him his vessel, and his liberty, and his good name. If he helped the captive to cheat the law, the law would most likely find out his complicity and fling him in turn into its prisons; and he knew well that Saturnino Masturna had been a murderer, not once, but many times; that his crimes against the law were dark and numberless, that he was still a wild beast ready to tear even the hand that aided him.

Yet it hurt him to leave the man there in his hourly torment, in his hopeless misery, and who could tell, if he were left thus, growing more and more brutish and desperate every day, how he might not in sheer despair call upon his daughter to drink his cup of bitterness with him? Or if he escaped by himself, might he not seek her out and compel her to shelter him