Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/48

 to do. He stayed a few days at Telamone, at the wretched little wine-house which was all the accommodation it could afford, and hired a little felucca and sailed along the coast to the Sasso Scritto, and thence, most days, walked inland to the tombs. This displeased her, and she made him feel it, though she checked many a harsh word unuttered because he was of Joconda's kindred.

He meekly asked her permission to finish his sketches of the sepulchres, and she gave it reluctantly, suspicious of a stranger's entrance in those solitudes.

Often when he arrived there to go on with his careful drawings of the walls, he found the place silent and empty; she was away, gone over the moors which she knew so well, and in whose mazes of vegetation it was hopeless for him to follow her. She avoided him; he was alien to her, he was outside the pale of her sympathies; she had more friendship for a sheldrake plunging and splashing amongst the pond-lilies, for a porcupine or a hedgehog creeping on its careful excursions under the giant fennel. She vaguely felt, as the gipsy feels it in the stranger who accosts him, that he desired to take her away from all this freedom. She did not