Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/100

 been the dagger red with so much blood! But the child shook her head and persisted:

'No: I do remember.'

And she sat down on the earthen floor, and put her arms round Leone, and leaned her head on his, and asked him, did he not remember too?

'Bless the good God that made the beasts dumb!' thought Joconda.

She hoped the child would not tell it to the neighbours. The child did not. She was never talkative, but held herself aloof; not out of shyness nor yet out of temper, because she was a bold child, and except for rare fits of untamable passion, was of serene temper, but out of a seriousness and indifference that seemed strange in one so young.

There was no one to give her guardian counsel in Santa Tarsilla.

The priest was a homely, ignorant man, son of a fisherman, one of themselves in both his ways and thoughts, and the rest were all poor creatures in her estimation, shrunken and sickened with fever, swollen with dropsy, or palsied with the ague of the coast, as they so often were, and living quite away from the world of men, hardly knowing when revolution was