Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/21

 his sides, and he kept saying to himself, 'If she should have come back?'

Still he walked on steadily for a space of two miles and more, always across the great green and purple moorland, and skirting the flowering marshes where the waters ran, and so coming out on to that wild growth of marucca and arbutus and myrtle scrub which hid from the light of the sun the graves of the Etruscans, and of old Joconda.

There he stopped and cleared away the branches and grasses which she was so careful to pull together over the entrance, and he laid bare to the view of the two strangers the first steps of the stone staircase.

'It is down there. Now give me!' he said, stretching out his little feverish hand, which had all its fingers clutching and moving greedily like a miserly old man's.

The stranger who had always addressed him put two scudi in his palm with a sense of astonishment and distaste.

'Who would think that the money-lust lived even here in a baby goatherd!' he said, as Zirlo took to his heels and, with his little fist closed on the silver, tore headlong backward through the bryonies to the place where his flock were grazing.