Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/82

 secure obedience. No one sees, no one cares; the shot beasts and the trapped birds are carried through the very gates of the towns, and the law is a dead letter.

She had been at one work or another all the morning and was tired. In a mossy dell some mile or two distant from the sepulchres—a green shady place, prankt with the blue and the rose-coloured lychnis, and the wild convolvulus, and the clematis both white and purple—she sat down to rest a little while amongst the mosses, and the warmth and the drowsy air overcame her, and her eyelids dropped, and her limbs stretched themselves out at ease, and she fell fast asleep.

There were many a danger there of asps that might creep from under the boulders of tufa, and of vipers that might steal from under the great leaves of the pan di serpe; even the booted-eagle, who passes his summers in the Apennines, might sail across the sky and espy her and do battle with her, as she had once seen him do it with a grand-duke owl till both of them fell dead together. But of these risks she seldom thought, and Leone lay at her feet and watched her quiet breathing.