Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/274

 she took up her spade and shovelled in the earth; dry as it had been, and loose, she knew that in the morning it would bear no sign of disturbance to careless eyes, and that most likely there would not be even a careless glance cast on that waste corner by the old sea wall.

When it was all filled in, the earth was lower than it had been, but this would seem no more than the natural in-sinking of the soil. She rested once again, a moment, from her labour, and drew breath again for her heaviest trial of strength, the lifting of the coffin over the wall and into the boat beneath. She had great strength in her symmetrical limbs; she was shaped as nobly as a Greek statue, and in her beautiful arms, her straight limbs, her superb hips, there was no less force than grace. From her childhood upward the sea had bathed, the wind had fed, the sweetness of sound sleep and the tonic of athletic exercise had nourished her. Beside the sun-starved, room-cooped prisoners of the factory and of the schoolroom she would have been as Atalanta beside the dried and shrivelled atomy of a specimen-jar. With all her strength now she raised the coffin by the cords she had knotted