Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/335

 hole in the earth? You do not seem to understand what you have become; but think once of all I say for sake of the dead woman who loved you.'

The words were wrung out of him almost despite himself. All the night long he had told himself that it was too late; that she chose her own fate and by it must abide. All the night long he had argued with himself that there was no other course for him than to set his face northward and banish her from his thoughts for ever. She was no longer lovely to him in body or mind; she seemed to him to have the gloom and taint of that Mantuan murder on her, and of the sin and shame of Saturnino. She was to him a Britomart, stripped and bound; a Penthesilea who was but her lover's slave, and did not blush to be that humbled thing.

All his fancy and his faith which had grown about and rooted themselves in her had withered when she had put her hand in Este's and led him out into the night of the moorland. He could not tell that Este's lips had never touched her own; he could not tell that the 'bit of sweet basil' of a dead woman's prayers had been as a magic girdle of defence about her. He could