Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/233

 the violets amidst the wood-moss on the banks, then he awakes and beholds her; and then the stream reflects but her shape for him, and the rushes are full of the melody of his love-call. It was still winter with Este—a bitter winter of discontent; and he had no eyes for this water-bird that swam with him through the icy current of his adversity.

To break the frozen flood that imprisoned him was his only thought.

Had he been asked he would have answered that his heart was dead, like last year's violets, and his passions with it.

'If only you could come out with me!' she said often with a sigh to him, since to her greatest and most cruel of all losses was it to be debarred the feel of the wind as it blew, the sight of the cloud-shadows as they sailed over the moors and meadows.

'Never more shall I see the sun and smell the heather, he said wearily. 'It is hardly worth while to live on—thus.'

Yet it was not the heather and the sun that he missed the most, or would the first have sought. His heaven had not lain, like hers, in the sense of the broad sky, in the feel of the elastic grass, in the simple joys of