Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/50

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CHAPTER XVIII.

ONCE or twice he met her upon the shore, and she gave him a curt word or two, and pushed her boat out into the water and sculled herself out of sight. He was unwilling to alarm or to scare her by too close pursuit, and he began to feel that his journey here would be fruitless. He was a man of honest purpose and clear conscience; he was incapable of wronging, even by a wish, a child bequeathed to the mercy of his people by a dead woman, but he began to grow dissatisfied and angry with his failure. He had obtained some rare drawings of an unmutilated tomb of Etruria; and this was the sole result that seemed likely to accrue to him from the waste of a midsummer month.