Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/203

 Though she was like a young dryad, and he like a little faun, they were but children after all. The childhood in them had its affinity and its attraction.

It was early in the day; a burning day in the most cruel month of the southern year, when even the red of the rosebud seems pale with heat, and even the gold of the sunflower wanes and rusts; when the birds are silent everywhere, and the grass looks like the sand of a desert, and even the deep still hours of midnight are stifling and without air, and the cloudless heavens are as a furnace of brass.

There was a broad ilex-oak here, and the boy was in the shelter of its shade, and the goats too. Musa sat down beside them. She had some black bread and a flask of water; he had the same. They ate and drank as two children might have done on the slopes of the Sicilian hills when Theocritus was shepherd there.

The boy was timid and yet attracted; she was displeased, and yet did not wish to be unkind. The great heat was around them and above them, like a sea of hot vapour; there seemed no hues anywhere that were not either grey or yellow; it