Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/171

 her, but she dared not lest others should overhear. She nevertheless paused by him one moment and slipped one of the silver coins the chemist had given her into his hand.

'Yes; I know,' she murmured, answering the guilty interrogation of his eyes. 'You robbed the dead. That was worse than robbing me. But I think they would forgive—now.'

Something in the tone of her voice brought to him the echo of a voice that he had loved; the voice of Serapia.

He put her coin between his teeth in silence. Then, as he looked up and saw her standing in the full daylight, with bare head and throat, something in her aspect and her features stirred memory in his brain.

He seemed to see his own face in the innocence of its adolescence as it had looked back at him mirrored in some hillside pool in that season of his boyhood when no blood was on his hands, no price was on his head.

A thrill of remembrance, a throb of wonder, stirred the sluggish apathy into which his ferocious passions had sunk under the drugs of monotony, inactivity, and despair.