Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/259

 'I am a fool,' he said to himself, but the folly grew with him. He had set his heart on saving her from this wild and solitary life, which was endurable only as long as youth and health should last, but even then was hourly filled with a thousand sources of peril and possible evil.

He grew uneasy. It was unlike her nature to fail in what she had promised; she was too grave to be capricious, too tenacious to be deterred by any obstacle or accident from doing what she had said she would do. He saw she had not come there in his absence, for she had not used the little boat, which remained always high and dry upon the shelf of rock, the oars and the fishing-gear lying inside it. For her to be so many days away from the sea, he felt that something unforeseen and serious must have occurred.

Any day, a wild boar might turn on her; a false step take her from the narrow path of safety into the slimy slow death of the black bog; the fever that she never feared might yet overtake her, or the lawless fierce men from the mountains find out her dwelling-place under the marucca and myrtle. The soil of Maremma was