Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/214

 She was drinking at that fatal fountain which Joconda once had feared that she would drink so deeply from that she would drown. But its waters were clear and harmless at her lips as yet; she could not tell that there was poison in them and bitter after-taste.

She did not even know the name of this fount at which all pilgrims of earth drink soon or late. She tended him as she had tended the wounded dotterel from the Polar seas. She loved him as she had loved that; but passion was still dumb and slumbering in her. Often in youth it lies and dreams like Endymion, and would never wake but for the kiss that startles sleep, and changes the dream into desire.

Once awakened, that peaceful rest, careless on the crushed cowslips, can come back no more.

So the months went on, and the days renewed themselves, each like the other; filled to her with bodily exertion that had become delightful because no longer for her own sake alone, and to him with the dull, heavy, stupid pain that men of cultured mind feel when they are barred out from the world of other men and from the face of nature.