Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/191

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"PASSION BORN OF A GLANCE!"
183

scream in the light of the moon, as the tramp of horses rang out on the rocks, or scattered the sands in a whirling cloud. There was savage delight to him in the breathless ride, in the intoxication of the odours trampled out from trodden roses and crushed citrons, in the fierce and sense of living, as he swept down the lonely shore the side of the luminous sea, hunting his murderer into his lair;—the wolf in its own steppes, the boar in its own pjne-forests, the tiger in the hot Indian night, the lion in the palm-plains of Libya; he had hunted them all in their tarn, but he had known no chase like that he rode now, when the quarry was not brute, but man.

The snorting nostrils of the Monarch touched the flanks of the straining Barbary, the hot steam of the one blent with the blood-flaked foam of the other. They raced together almost side by side, dashing down a precipitous ridge of shore, entangled with a riotous growth of aloes and oleander: Erceldoune saw that his assassin was making for some known and near lair, as a fox hard-pressed heads for covert, and he thundered on in hotter and hotter pursuit, till the steel of the rifle glittered close in Count Conrad's sight as he turned again, his face livid and the breath