Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/207

 on him with force and sorcery, and changed the whole tenor of his dreaming, sleepy days. He lived thenceforward only for one woman, in all the beguiling mystery of a secret and mutual love.

What he saw now was the beauty of that dead mistress. There is no coldness so unchanging, so unyielding, so absolute, as the coldness of one who loves what is lost. Actually, he never saw Musa with any eyes that realised her beauty or her girlhood.

He saw some one who was good to him in his sickness and extremity; that was all. The woman slain in Mantua, with the cruel hole in her breast and the datura lilies red with her blood, was for ever between him and this creature who tended him, fed him, sheltered him, saved him.

He had passed through one of those terrible hours in life which even in the most sensual temperaments burn out for the moment all fires of sense and quench desire in horror. He loved with all his force the woman murdered in Mantua; and yet he knew she was dead, dead, dead—a putrid thing pushed away under the friable, watery soil. The terror of that, the ghastliness of