Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/98

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90
IN MAREMMA.

but only languidly, and he did not fully awake to the remembrance of what had passed.

'You are good; you are good; that cools me,' he murmured as the water fell on him.

He was in a feverish sort of trance, his skin was burning, and his breath was short and quick.

She was absorbed in her efforts to help him; she did not notice that he was a man young, and wonderfully handsome, with the beauty of the Greek ideal; beauty which not exposure, or imprisonment, or shame, or terror, or privation, or the ghastly horrors of the galleys had had any power to destroy, though they had wasted, darkened, and dimmed it, as dust and ill-usage obscure the soilless glory and fine lines of the marble god. Of all this she saw nothing, thought nothing; it was enough for her that he was hunted and in fear, like the beasts and the birds of the Maremma.

She tended him as she would have taken care of a stricken deer or a maimed hawk. Saturnino's name said nothing to her. She thought of him only as a thief who had robbed the dead; but even as she had aided