Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/266

258 and she dealt with him as if he were the hunter and snarer she had called him.

'She shall do me justice ere I go, if I must leave her to her fate,' he thought as he walked on over the soaked turf and cut his way through the pungente and the prickly pettygree.

His step flushed woodcocks, the partridge flew before him up from her tuft of rosemary, the coots fluttered and splashed as he passed their pools, a pilgrim falcon sailed by holding a rat in its talons. He was a mountaineer, a hunter on his own alps, but he never noticed these creatures now. Even, artist though he was, the beauty of the scarlet balls hanging amongst the glossy leaves of the arbutus, of the red earth glowing under the morning sun, of the brimming streamlets coursing through the grass, of the flocks of white northern divers settled on the estuaries, of the azure and emerald wings of the kingfisher and the porphyrion flashing amidst the grey network of leafless willows, even these, and all the untellable wonder of colour woven there in the shadow and the sunshine as on a web of green and gold, of scarlet and purple, escaped his sight that day.