Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/194

 all the other kingdoms of the dead, all the hosts over whom the king, who had vanished in the light of the stars, once had reigned.

The upper world, that bore the oaks and the grain, the honeysuckle and the holythorn, became almost nothing to her; it was but as a mere crust above the true world, the world where the dead in their millions slept and awaited—what?she did not know, but she felt she would wish to wait with them for ever, rather than be one in that sordid, sickly, little living world she knew, with its greed over a haul of fish, its savage quarrels over a copper-piece, its worry, its weariness, its wailing, its beds of sickness, and its hearts of stone.

To whosoever dwells in an ideal world the world of men and women seems but a poor thing; and Musa began to dwell in one—she, whose father had seen no beauty save in a scarlet lip, a narrow poignard, a sack of gold, a pool of blood.

The little that Joconda had said of the nation of dead, instead of allaying the fever of her fancy, inflamed it.

'Do they tell of these dead people in books?' she asked Joconda once, who answered: