Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/59

 hamadryads, and he could not bring himself to be the one who should snatch her from her mossy couch and canopy of leaves to drag her into the fictitious wants, the artificial customs, and the, always in a measure, vulgar strife of human life in modern days.

Her manner of existence was like nothing else now on earth; it was like that of a young priestess of Fauna or of Pales in the Golden Age. He could not forcibly disturb it any more than he, of a humane and a poetic nature, could have plucked out of the reeds the little blue warblers' nest in the season of their love and in the spring-time of the year. Would she have come willingly, willingly would he have run all risks of misconstruction and ridicule from his fellows to do her loyal service in any way she chose. But he could not use against her the pricks and bands of that civil law of whose very name she knew nothing: a law always cruel in all lands to the homeless wanderer and to the offspring of a criminal.

The law would not see, as he saw, the innocence and beauty of that woodland life, of that tender fidelity to dead Joconda, of that serene independence of the help of man.