Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/65

 the future, the ways of living like any bird or beast of the moors, which were so good in Musa's eyes, were intolerable to him. He sympathised with her passion for her strange dwelling-place as little as the Hollander can sympathise with the Bedouin.

He was a great painter, but his creations were cold, clear, classic, faultless, full of intellect; and even in the colour and movement of Parisian life the influences of the stiff, serene, precise routine of the Swiss home of his boyhood had never entirely left him.

Musa, with her lovely face and her noble regard, had fascinated him, and a pity, so intense as to be pain, had moved him for the child of Saturnino, whose birth-history he knew, though she did not know it. But his pity was rejected, and a certain anger began to grow up in him.

Why should I trouble about her?' he thought; 'she has wild blood in her; doubtless a wild life suits her; and doubtless, too, to take her to that tranquil home on the Lake of Geneva would be to loose a tornado in a greenhouse; yet it is horrible that she should be left here to go to ruin, body and soul, as she must do.'