Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/260

 treacherous as Iago, and, though she made no count of it, her days were full of danger as the timid snipe's for whom the fox waits in the brushwood, and the muzzle of the gun slips through the reeds, and the hawk watches above in the air, and the dog steals through the fennel and brankursine. She in her courage and ignorance hardly ever thought of these perils, and trusted to the earth and to the water as a child to its progenitors. But Sanctis, who had thought of them almost unceasingly ever since he had first seen her face, was tormented now by his own imagination.

The people of the coast wondered to see him there, but they supposed he was one of those foreigners who to them seemed half-witted, who endured privations, and penetrated trackless swamps, and asked innumerable questions, in the effort to find buried stones and marbles under the vegetation of Maremma.

He spent money willingly and gave no trouble, and understood their boating and their fishing; he had not been unwelcome to them in the summer-time, and he paid largely for the little vessel that he hired and sailed himself.