Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/206

 above his breath, and a Greek chorus was second to a Latin hymn. There he had grown up a beautiful, graceful, pensive lad, in a home straitened by penury and made austere by devotion, but keeping something of the stateliness of grander times.

To drop slowly down the wide lagoons and thread the mazes of the reed-thickets was his chief, often his only, occupation; to make his mandoline throb a love-lay under some old sculptured casement, where some fancy of the hour was hiding behind a curtain of frayed velvet or tattered tapestry, was his sole diversion. There was enough to live on; that slender pittance that kept his father and himself in a corner of the dark old palace would be enough for him to live on afterwards. No one spoke to him of action or of ambition; they were unknown words in Mantua; he lived through his years as idly and as thoughtlessly as any one of the dragon-flies above the rushes lived out their summer hour. If he were pensive and serious, it was only because the spirit of the place was on him and the sense of narrow fortunes curbed his youth.

Then, when he was twenty-four, this passion for an old man's young wife came