Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/138

 as its hole in the rock to the cliff-pigeon, only to him but a prison the more?

'That brute, cursed with a thousand crimes, can get free!' he muttered. And I shall rot away my whole life in a hole in the rocks, and hear the feet of men go by above in the grass! And there is no blood on my hands!'

She looked at him in awe and pain.

'I thought you would be glad, for his sake,' she said wistfully, and then added, with a quiver of exceeding tenderness in her voice: 'For me, I wish all his crimes forgiven him; he sent you here.'

That exquisite softness of meaning and of accent passed by him; he was envying the freed man his flight across the sea to that mysterious isle, where, safe in the darkness of immemorial forests, the wild beasts still live in peace.

'If you had never seen me, it would have been well for you,' he said, with a sudden sense of self-reproach.

'When you are content, it is well with me; so well!' she said softly.

The very tenderness of the answer galled him; he passed it over.

'Saturnino did not mean you well,' he