Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/146

Rh stretching out in their measureless freedom to the infinite.

"It is gentler than earth," she muttered. "Men die hardly on the bitterness of the land—the land which devours them that she may blossom and laugh with fruits born of corruption;—but the very death that the sea gives is dreamy and tranquil. And the sea will not render its dead, but loves them, and lulls them, and holds them ever with their stories untold. Where is there any other thing so merciful as that?" There was the longing of a melancholy, weary to despair, through the poet-like thought of the murmured words; in that moment she would gladly have sought the unbroken rest that could alone be found in the deep sea-bed, beneath those fathomless and changeless waves.

She sank down on a broken pile of rock, with the ribbed sand at her feet and the bulwark of the mighty cliff rising above; her face was colourless, haggard, almost stern, as though there were set on it such hatred of herself that all its youth and brilliancy changed to one bitter heart-sick scorn; her hair was thrust back off her brow; her eyes looked with a tearless, thirsty pain over the waters. There had been silence between them well-nigh