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 been laid gently down upon those rocky biers in the Etruscan tomb, there to wait till the moonlight should touch her and take her to itself, as it had touched and taken the Etruscan king. But how could she ever rise from that narrow bed, from that stifling sand, from that ghastly crowded place where the dead lay like mounds of putrid fish, thrown down and forsaken?

It was late in the day when the child awoke from this heavy troubled sleep, which left her dazed and fatigued, as she had been at night; awoke with the burning sun on her aching eyes, to hear impatient hands knocking at the shutters and the house door:

'Art thou dead, too?' the shrill voices of women were calling.

Musa shuddered, and in the scorching heat of the morning felt cold.

Was Joconda in truth lost for ever? Had this death which had been so long in the mist of a vague dread and foreboding become a fact? Would she never come back?

The neighbours knocked louder and louder. She rose, clothed herself and opened to them.

'What do you want?' she asked of them.