Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/314

 fail, and no living thing be left betwixt her lover and him.

She continued to follow him, going through the strange ways of the wondrous place with no more sight of them than if she had been blind.

The noise of the streets, the confusion and babble, and sounds of moving horses, of soldiers' trumpets, of shouting charlatans, of rapidly-revolving wheels, all went by her unheard.

Her fear of the city was lost in a yet intenser fear. Had its streets been a furnace, she would have plunged into its flames.

Saturnino left the noisier and gayer streets to pass into the dark steep lanes that encompass the Pantheon and lead the way to Tiber. It seemed to her as if these miry, crooked, gloomy ways would never end; their rough uneven pavements, their battered darkling house-walls, their stench, and the cries that filled them from the brazen lungs of the populace thronging through them, made them seem to her like the passage-ways of hell. Yet she scarcely felt the flints under her feet, the foul smell in the air, the uproar on her ear; she was almost as sightless, almost