He walked down the length of the main street, past the little white, stone houses asleep in the sun, past the mairie where the pompous mayor was drowsing across from the pompous chief of gendarmes, past the great cast-iron fountain which he had given to the municipality; and again he felt the harsh enmity of the land.
It was hotter than usual—with a sort of hushed, dry, tense heat which sent the blood racing through his veins; and it seemed to him that, beneath his feet, from the heart of the land, he could hear a muffled, staccato breathing which was like the breathing of a huge, amorphous beast—a beast about to rise and stretch—and kill—as though, across the forests and rocks on its breast, the spirit of Corsica called to him—mocking, jeering, cruel, inimical—and currents of subterranean earth life tugged and jerked at his self.
The marquis dried his face with his handkerchief.
Once more he tried to tell himself that it was all the result of a pathological disturbance, and that what he needed was a trip to Paris, three hundred francs paid into the hands of Dr. Hector Laflique, the alienist, and a brome prescription filled at the
