Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/142

 in great awe. For a few moments her eyes beheld the form of the dead warrior; then, all in an instant, it crumbled away before her very sight, riveted in amaze upon it.

The air and the light entering with her, after exclusion for two thousand years or more, reached the oxydised armour, the recumbent corpse, and melted them back to dust. Soon, where the warrior, who looked to her but sleeping, had been stretched on his cold bed, there was nothing but a few grey ashes.

She stood motionless as though she were changed to marble; a sort of trance had fallen upon her as the golden king had faded into that heap of pallid ashes. A cloud had obscured the sun, and the feeble light that had reached the subterranean chamber had ceased to come there, the painted figures on the walls faded away in the gloom; it seemed to be already night.

She was afraid, but her fear had the sublimity of awe in it, and nothing of the feebleness of terror. Was it death? was it life? was it a god? was it a devil that was near her now?

All the words that she had heard in the church of Santa Tarsilla, and which had