Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/146

 away into the light, and had left her alone in his place.

The great fear was still upon her like frost upon a flower.

She could not understand what she had seen. She could not comprehend what place this was in which she stood. But the instinct of reviving life made her long to rise and flee; it put strength into her limbs and courage into her veins; she dragged herself towards the entrance, thrust herself through the narrow aperture, and forced herself once more up into the air, under the open sky.

When she saw the bushes around her and the stars above, she gave a cry of joy; they were familiar, they were friends.

She breathed again.

She felt no fear of the fresh night, of the lonely moors, of the silence and the solitude of these marshes that stretched around. She knew them all. When the bats flew by her, and the owls, she stretched out her hand to them and laughed aloud.

After that awful silence, that intense cold, that terrible nameless burial-place, the moles burrowing in the black earth, the water-beetle blundering through the shadows, the stealthy polecat hunting rats through