Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/75

 Spanish coast, a sea-storm was raging already, and coursing like a greyhound to reach and overtake the blue Ligurian waters,

Even if she had not known what soon would come by the look of the sky and the feel of the waves, she would have known it by the way in which the big ships in the offing spread every stitch of canvas in the effort to make a port before the tempest should be upon them, and the way in which the little lateen craft came running in from every point of the compass, fishermen knowing that 'the devil would take the hindmost.'

Her own boat flew like a curlew, for the change in the wind favoured her, but though it sprang from wave to wave and was as buoyant as any cork Musa knew her own danger very well. Her boat was but as a nautilus-shell that would soon be tossed and whirled in a typhoon. To reach her own shore would be hard; to land might prove impossible. She reproached herself bitterly that she had not read more wisely the look of the skies at daybreak; but even wary and weatherwise fishermen make such mistakes at times, and have the blackness of the tempest and the howling hurricane down on