Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/28

 scarlet, soft, yet intense as the colour of pomegranate flowers, glowed above it, and melted into the azure of the still shining skies. The moorlands were dark and hushed; the sea was the hue of the zenith.

She looked, and her eyes filled.

Then, far off, very far off, she saw a little dark figure, black against the ruby and the gold. All her rage sprang back into her heart, and she ground her teeth like a wolf. She wound her short and narrow skirt about her limbs, and with bare feet and bare shoulders leaped across the grass and ran like a greyhound.

He was half a mile off. In his babyish cunning he thought that if he were near at hand with his goats, she would think him innocent. Seeing her, across the moorland, coming towards him, swift and silent as the wind, his cunning deserted him, and his fear alone mastered him. He fled.

She gained on him nearer and nearer. No fawn of those wild meadows was swifter on her feet than she; she ran as the Greek girls ran of old in the arena, in the springtime of their lives and of the year.

The dark elastic turf, the lightsome woodmoss, rebounded from her touch; she sprang