Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/288

 Perhaps, she thought, this man was mad, perhaps his long accumulated crimes, and his many years of captivity, had made him lose his reason; but, mad or sane, remembering how he had looked, how he had spoken, she began to doubt, she began bitterly to lament that she had blessed him and wished his sins forgiven him. Assassination had been no more to him than the slitting of the kid's throat is to the butcher; human life had never been of more account to him than the grass of the field as it drops is to the mower; he, like Etruscan Tarquin, had held men of no greater sanctity than the poppies growing with the corn.

There had been cruel hate in him when he had spoken of Este; why had she not seen that before, why had she let him go away? An agony of fear came on her; the worst of all fear to bear because it was so vague.

Instinct rather than any reasoning made her feel that the return of Saturnino meant some peril, if not the greatest, to her lost lover.

Would aught save crime have had the power to lure him from the secrecy of the Sardinian forests?