Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/284

 Before the last word had reached his ear she was away and was soon lost to sight beyond a dense wall of arbutus and mastic.

She knew the wisdom of the woods herself as well as the bittern or the great plover knows it.

Sanctis retraced his steps with a heavy heart, seeing nothing in the blue pale light of the wintry day but her face as it had been raised to his while her hand had played with the steel. He was discouraged and discomfited, and a sense of painful defeat and mortification was upon him; she had threatened his life, and he had yielded to her. He was a man of courage enough to bear to look a coward if it were needful to do so, yet it hurt him as he went away to think that no doubt, as she was going through the leafless woodlands and the green bay thicket, she was thinking of him with contempt, perhaps with laughter.

But his nature was calm and very patient. He knew that he had been unwise to use the menace of the law to her, and that her menace of the knife had been but her natural reply. He promised himself to do better, to speak more tranquilly when next he sued her; for her threat that he should