Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/298

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IN MAREMMA.

began to be afraid lest her strength should fail her ere she knew whither he went.

Between sunrise and sunset he covered from fifteen to twenty miles, and she did the same. Two years before such walking as this would have been mere sport to her; but now she was no longer as strong as she had been, her splendid vitality bad been rudely shaken, and her limbs began to tremble as she moved, and she began at times to stumble and recover herself with effort. Still she kept onwards, and was scarcely sensible of anything she felt from the passion of anxiety that possessed her. She could not but believe some wicked purpose sent this murderer on this strange pilgrimage on foot to Rome.

Of the land he knew every rood. In all the province there was not a mule-track he had not followed, not a cluster of hovels he had not visited in those many years of vigil and of violence, when his lair had been made by the snows of Monte Labbro, and his gallant person had been pointed out with pride at the feasts of the mountain villages, and even in the market-places of Grosseto, of Massa, and of Volterra. He was at home here in these woodlands on these moorlands,