Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/109

 did she lie for hours on the soft wood-moss to watch the clouds move by and change. The sylvan life, the impersonal life, was over for evermore, and she deemed her loss her gain.

Since he durst not trust himself to the daylight, she stayed beside him, and let the starry squills uncurl along the shore, and the tulips spread a scarlet carpet through the meadows, and the royal asphodel uplift its sceptre to the sun, unseen by her eyes, that loved them with the poet's love.

But he could not go out into the light of day, he could not venture forth when his hunters might at every step fall on him: never a syllable escaped her of regret for that which was impossible. The world was so far from her; she knew not of it; she was a law to herself, and her whole duty seemed to her set forth in one simple word—perhaps the noblest word in human language—fidelity. When life is cast in solitary places, filled with high passions, and led aloof from men, the laws which are needful to curb the multitudes, but yet are poor conventional foolish things at their best, sink back into their true signification and lose their fictitious awe.

He and she were as utterly alone as the first human lovers in the allegory of Eden;