Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/175

 and listened and flirted, and had a merry word and a bashful blush for each of them; and in Musa they found a restive, silent, scornful creature; for what do young sailors, or landsmen either, want with a girl who only sees Laura's dead lover, and has no eyes at all for them and their festa bravery?

Throughout Maremma, where love plays fast and loose, and the sower of the corn is seldom the reaper of it, and the hunter of one autumn is rarely the same as another—in Maremma, where the passions are lava and the faith is thistle-down,—the boldest and the lightest would never have dared an amorous word to the Musoncella.

There was a straight, far-away look in her great blue-black eyes, and a curve on her red lips that would have scared them, even had any of those passers-by had time to tarry and see what a rare and strange flower was growing up in the stony, reedy sands of the dreary world-forgotten place. And_ besides, there was Joconda, who always banged the door with scant ceremony, or grumbled a morose good-morrow, if she saw any human being looking twice at the child whom she had called after Mary the Penitent Joconda was always afraid for the future.