Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/266

 It was full of liars and of thieves. She abhorred it. Though its sands were to become full of silver ore, as the soil of Populonia once had been, she said to herself that never again should her feet tread them.

Let them keep the money and kill each other fighting over it!

She almost smiled as she sat there in the gloom and thought of old Andreimo beaten to and fro by the struggling women, and clutching at the coins and shrieking in his feeble treble.

'One would think that gold were God!' she thought; remembering how but three days before the galley-slave had robbed her: robbed the tomb that was sacred, the dead that were defenceless.

The terror of her own lonely and hapless fate looked at her from the awful eyes of the sculptured Chimera and the frowning brows of the painted Typhon; yet so consoled was she to be in this silent sanctuary that she began to think of her future maintenance and her future liberty here with a sense of deliverance rather than of danger. There would indeed, she knew, be no means of gaining any livelihood here. She could spin well, but so could every one else in the