Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/120

 The old summer silence, the old summer solitude, were come again; the crickets laughed in all the grass and all the trees, and she was happy because the land was lonely, left to him and her, shared only by the blithe birds and the innocent beasts.

She began to lose the fear of his arrest. As the calm days and weeks glided by they brought by their tranquil recurrence a sense of safety with them. The season of peril had passed, and the sun now put a zone of torrid heat and dazzling light about their refuge, and the fever mists that to others were terror were to her as a welcome wall risen up between them and mankind.

The long, deep, unbroken stillness of the Maremma day was sweet to her in this midsummer time, when even the lusty, full-throated merle was tired of song, and, except the hum of insect life and the mirth of the tree-frogs, there was no sound at all throughout the land from sunrise until sunset. Into the tomb of the Lucumo the heat of the upper air could not penetrate greatly: there was a drowsy warmth in it, no more. Whilst even the moor-hen was hot amongst the mat-grass, and even the eagle flew with languid wing over the olive woods of the