Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/189

 her way through the pale dusty haze of a summer twilight in sickly Grosseto.

The memories of the mountain winds, the deep still woods, the crystal clearness of the cold bright air, the forest silence on those heights where the sole visitants were the eagle and the vulture, came back upon her mind amidst the heat, the dust, the heaviness, the nauseousness of the atmosphere of the seashore in Maremma.

'Surely I am near my end,' she thought, knowing that when the thoughts of youth return fresh as the scent of new-gathered blossoms to the tired old age which has so long forgot them, the coming of Death is seldom very distant; and she jolted home behind the mule, falling asleep at intervals while the beast took his homeward course unerringly, and when she awoke with a start and saw the level and mournful plains around her, she did not for the moment understand, and began to call Rosa, and Nix, and Dorothea, the cows that she had had at pasture on the Alps when she had been some fifteen summers old!

'Lord, their bones lie bleaching fifty years!' she said to herself, knowing her own folly; yet she could see them all; the