roused and at its height; he wheeled the hunter and rode him back, then turned again and put him full gallop at the barrier, nursing him for the leap; the marble wall rose before them, clothed with the foliage of fig and tamarisk trees; he lifted the horse in the air, cleared the stracture, and came down on the yielding bed of wild geranium that broke the sheer descent.
On the ground lay the Barbary mare, panting and quivering on her side: the saddle was empty.
A darkness like the night came upon Erceldoune's face as he saw that his enemy had escaped him—a darkness closely and terribly like crime on his soul.
Wolf, and boar, and lion, he had chased them all to their lair, and brought them down, now and again, a thousand times other, by the surety of his shot, by the victory of his strength. His secret assassin, hunted and run to earth, at his mercy and given up to his will through the whole length of that race down the Bosphorus waters, had outstripped his speed, had baffled his vengeance, and was let loose again on the world with his name unconfessedy with his brute guilt unavenged, lost once more in the solitudes of the night, in the vastness of
