Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/289

 skilled at imitation to be often capable of original creation. It passed the weary hours for him to mould the clay with his hands and such rude instruments as he had been able to fashion out of the bronze Etruscan spillæ and knives found in the tombs. He thought, too, that the time might come when she would be able to sell them for a trifle in some town; and he would thus be able to bring his quota to their maintenance.

He had modelled, in the grey river earth, flowers and fruits and oak-leaves, all forest things she brought him; the Typhon, too, and the Chimæra, and the lotus-lilies of the walls around him; but, oftenest of all, the head of Musa. Sometimes he made her with the lotus on her brow, like that Braschi Antinous she resembled; sometimes he set the sacred hawk of Egypt upon her head, as it had been set upon Cleopatra's; sometimes he took her in her own simplicity, with no wreath but her own curls, and her woollen gown, still cut like the tunics of Della Robbia's choristers, drawn close up around her slender, rounded throat; and often, as he did so, the features and the eyes of the woman murdered in Mantua would come