Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/139

 this stranger, now exhausted by the most enfeebling of all maladies, and who, each day recovering more, would need more nourishment—this was a terrible problem. Yet it never occurred to her to leave him, as she could so easily have done, and go up to the hill-villages, where her spinning and her rush-plaiting would have kept her very well throughout the winter-time, when all busy hands are welcome. She never thought once of deserting him. All at once a duty seemed to her to have sprung out of the earth for her as the orchid sprang out of the rank grass of the moors, to glow on the dulness of her solitary life as the nupha lutea gleamed, a cup of virgin gold upon the stagnant pools.

She knew what he wanted, and would want more and more—good red wine and animal flesh—to give him back the strength of which the insidious marsh fever had robbed him, emptying his veins of their blood and health and pouring into them instead its own poison. The nausea of the ghastly malady remained with him after the fever had ceased to consume him as though fire were turning his bones to ashes, as the flame of the woodsmen scorched up the