Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/106

Rh across her brow and at her feet. He was almost silent; his love had a great humility, and made it seem to him hopeless that his hand could ever have title even to wander among the richness of her hair.

To have light to win her lips to close on his, it seemed to him that a man should have done such great and glorious things as should have made his life.

The full heat of the noon was just passed, the bells of afternoon vespers were sounding from a little campanile that rose above a jumbled mass of rock and foliage, grey jutting wall, and pale green olive woods; through a break in the foliage the precipitous road was just seen, and a group of weather-browned peasant women, with the silver spadella in their hair, going upward to the chapel of S. Maria del Mare. Idalia rose, and followed them with her eyes. In an unformed wish, born of weary impatience, she almost envied them their mule-like round of life, their simple, dogged, childish faith, their nurtured indifference alike to pleasure and to pain.

That animal life is to be envied, perhaps?" she