Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/56

 made war on; the poor were sacred to him. That we know. Yet he will lie in chains amidst the waves on Gorgona, or waste his strength in the mines in the bowels of the earth. It is unjust. It is unjust.'

Then an assenting and approving murmur rose up from the listening people and joined with the murmur of the sea.

Joconda heard them as she lay on her hard straw bed.

'And there is a grain of truth in what they say,' she thought. 'Yet his sins were many and deep, poor soul! and they will be heavier about his neck than the chains he will wear on Gorgona. May Christ lighten them!'

Then she slept.

She was a woman who usually enjoyed the dreamless, heavy sleep of the hard worker; but all through this night she dreamed and saw the bold form of Saturnino chained, and with his crimes written on his breast for any who chose to read, even as he would be henceforth in all his years to come on the sunburnt, wave-beaten rock: the eagle of the mountains fettered to a stone in the sea.

At daybreak her mind was made up;