Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/61

 and that any one with eye and ear trained to the sights and the sounds of the moors and the woods could, without much hardship, find enough from them to hold body and soul together. On the lonely mountain-sides of Italy many still live as simply as S. Francesco did upon Alvernia; their only bread what the wild oats give, their only esculent the fungi that grow about the roots of the holm-oaks, their only wine the spring that bubbles up amongst the water-cress.

But to Maurice Sanctis, fresh from the world of civilisation and culture, with its infinite multiplication of needs and desires, it appeared terrible for a woman who was scarcely more than a child to dwell thus, to be alone in the winter nights, to face the privations of the winter weather, to be dependent on her own strength of limb and surety of eye for all her maintenance, to have neither dream nor desire of any other life than this, which was no higher than the deer's in the moorlands, the flamingo's in the willowy swamps.

With daybreak on the fifteenth morning of his fruitless stay at sorrowful Telamone he went to speak to her, if he could, for the last time. He had the good fortune to find