Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/13

 known he would attribute to the message seemed the only one which could possibly move a stranger to offer him a boon so immense, to incur a risk so weighty; and the quick suspicion that lies in wait in every Italian nature, for ever watchful and sleepless, suggested to him darker reasons, crueller hopes, that might spur on this foreigner to share his danger and propose his flight. For the crime of which he had been accused, and for which he had been consigned to the galleys, any other nation would give him up, any other civilised country would be compelled by the laws of extradition to deliver him over to his own land to undergo his sentence.

After the first moments of involuntary gratitude and hope, he saw nothing in the message of Maurice Sanctis but an intricate and acute scheme to remove him for ever from Musa and consign him with more or less directness ultimately to the prisons whence he had escaped.

'Your friend forgets,' he said bitterly to her as all these thoughts coursed through his brain, 'or maybe rather he remembers appositely, that I have been accused of and condemned for murder. That is a crime to