Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/286

 around it. It now belonged to a noble family who had many such places. It was neglected and half dismantled. No one cared to come to it; stewards ate in its tapestried halls and peasants made pigsties of its long vaulted corridors.

Maurice Sanctis had wandered over it in the first days that he had stayed in Maremma; the glory of its views, the intensity of its loneliness, and its war-scarred towers and weed-grown terraces pleased him. Money was nothing to him; his father Anton had left him great riches, and he had simple tastes that cost him little. He thought to himself now that he would buy this place; the price was a mere trifle, hardly more than the value of the pine-woods about its bastions. It was melancholy and had been stripped of many of its carvings, marbles, and tapestries long before, but the magnificence of its landscape and the solidity of its walls nothing but an earthquake could destroy.

That night he went to Grosseto and there saw the notary who had been charged with its sale for twenty years and more. To the rich an easy path is soon made. He was promised that in a week or two at the