Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/197

 lands they hurt her with a sudden sense of their unfitness and their hatefulness.

'It is better with the dead,' she thought, when she went reluctantly home to the low-lying shore when the flat roofs of Santa Tarsilla were white and black under the moon.

When a certain Etruscan tomb was broken open in Italy, and one of those necklaces of fine gold that no known work can surpass for skill was found in the grave, a duchess, still living, put the dead woman's ornament on her own throat, and danced in it on that night.

Musa never so offended the dust. She would as soon have rifled the Madonna's altar as have touched their jewels.

She let all the gold and the earthenware lie or stand where she had found it, where the mourners had placed it when the bones had been laid there; and although in one of the empty biers there were golden chains and golden grasshoppers, and a girdle of gold such as might well tempt a girl to put them above her linen boddice and about her woollen kirtle, she let them lie—she whose father had snatched gold wherever he saw it.

She spent many an hour in loneliness,