Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/310

 gates with other men than to endeavour to enter the city secretly by any suspected means.

Her heart tightened as she saw him take the road.

It would be far more difficult to follow him in any highway or any street than it had been upon the downs and moors, where the clear air showed every figure on them as far as the human eye could reach in vision. Once in a street, a momentarily-gathering crowd, the passage of a waggon, the twist of any unknown passage, the barrier of a group of people, any unforeseen trifle, might take him from her sight, never, perhaps, to be found again in this great city which appalled her as she drew nigh it with its over-spreading walls and roofs, and palaces and cupolas and towers, and dusky piles of red-brown travertine, and gigantic churches that seemed to surge, colossal, from a petrified sea of stone.

Fear took the place of that exaltation which had sustained her sinking limbs so far: the nameless fear which comes on all free forest things when they are driven to approach a city.

She, like them, was bold so long as the