Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/323

312 unending misery through his memory, through his loss of her.

Through the darkness and the stillness round her the sounds of the declining day, that was still bright upon the world, came with strange dístinctness. The song of a child's voice on the air; the noise of a water-wheel ín a stream; the slow droning notes of monastic bells; the laughter of vinedressers among the budding vines; the mournful chaunt of a requiem as a village funeral passed with the crucifix borne aloft; a thousand murmurs of sweet sunlit idyllic life, came on the stillness with a jarring cruelty through the ceaseless tread of the soldiers' feet, and the slow creaking of the reluctant wheels. At length they paused and bade her descend. She drew back : "Where he goes, I go!"

She spoke, not with the supplication of a woman who loved to rest near what she loved, but rather with the entreaty of remorse to share the victim's fate, with the demand of a leader to endure whatever fell to the lot of one who too loyally obeyed such leadership. The soldier laughed noisily:

"Oh, yes! you shall have your lover, 'llustrissima. Come!—or it will be worse for him."

She obeyed, obliged to be content with such a promise, lest the threat against him should be borne