Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/187

 'Are they all dead, do you think?' she said, sharing Joconda's vague anxiety.

'Ay, for sure, they are all dead,' said Joconda, with a smothered sigh; and in the dust, in the glare, in the furnace-blast of the scirocco that is like a curse from the mouth of a fever-stricken man, she told her beads and muttered to herself:

'Dear heaven! for the feel of the snow in the air, for the smell of the great pine woods in the wind—what I would give, what I would give! But I have nothing to give; I am old and a fool; and they are dead, my brothers.'

To be sure they were dead; dead many a year, no doubt, with the cross set at their headstones, about the little chapel under the crest of the mountain; the little chapel that she remembered so well, lying so high that the clouds bathed it, and the snow scarce melted till June. And she would herself lie here in the sand and the sun.

During this hot summer season the thought of them, her two only brothers, grew stronger and stronger upon her; and as she drove one day into Grosseto, the remembrance grew so vivid that she went to a scrivener and said to him—