Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/280

 again yourself, I am not unjust to you; if you are a traitor you deserve a traitor's death, and I would give it to you—yes—though I tracked you for twenty years over one-half the earth.'

He looked at her with perplexity and admiration. He had lived all his years in the midst of cultured and controlled communities where the passions were tamed and the inborn ferocity of the human animal was scarcely visible; he had been reared amongst pious and reserved people, and his manhood had been spent amidst men whose minds were steeped in light and art, and who had little of the natural brute left in them. This intensity of purpose, this readiness for fierce action if by no other means its ends could be attained, this constancy in vengeance which would wait through half a lifetime rather than forego punishment, these the qualities of an earlier time, of a simpler and freer world than his, fascinated him by their force and their absolute unlikeness to anything in his own life. The sense of impotence that she had felt before his northern calmness and tenacity now fell on him before her more spontaneous and more violent nature; he felt that he might as well have tried to