Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/157

 from the very edge of death, wrestled for long with sickness and pain, and possessed and adored?

But for her he had been ere now a lifeless creature, fallen under some tangle of mastic, some bush of marucca, eaten by the hogs of the brake and the marsh, picked bare to the bone by the birds of Maremma; no more than any rotting lizard or carcase of a buffalo dead of drought.

She was but a wild creature of the moors herself, with something noble in her instincts born there as in a dog's, and with something of strength and faithfulness taught her by Joconda.

Her first impulses were of passion and of possession.

He was hers, here, in the shadowy caverns of the earth. Why should she lose him to the world of light, that unknown world where she had neither place nor part?

His water-city that he loved; the women leaning from their lattices, with the pearls braided in their hair; the hum of strange towns, the stir and strife of streets, the laughter and the music, the learning and the love, the jocund