Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/186

 and the next day she brought out their few scant letters, of which the latest was thirty years old, and bade Musa read them aloud to her.

The child read them with some difficulty; they were short and grave, such letters as busy farmers would write on a winter's night when the chalet was blocked in snow, and their mountain side seemed severed by a wall of ice from all the world. Joconda listened, and said never a word. Her heart was full. Herself, she could not read, but she looked at the signatures, Anton Sanctis, Joachim Sanctis; and it seemed once more as though she were fifteen years old, and her brothers were breasting the face of the rocks and calling to her where she stood above, with the red and white cow Dorothea. She had never spoken of her youth to the child before. She spoke now, in few words, but tenderly.

Musa, with the old faded yellow ill-writ letters lying on her knee, sat in the sultry pestilential mists of a summer day in Maremma, and heard of that land of coolness, of rest, of forest stillness, of glacier solitude. It seemed strange to her, and very wonderful.