Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/159

 The many miles seemed like a rood, yet they cost treble the time to traverse than ever they had cost her before.

The old joy with which she had always seen the brown swell of the uplands, the blasted stem of the big cork tree, was all gone. She was afraid to see them now, the burden of this knowledge being shut up in her breast.

It seemed to her as if iron were bound about her ankles; the placid, drowsy amber light seemed like a wall of steel between herself and him. Without knowing what she feared, she was afraid to look upon his face with this secret withheld.

They had always met each other as simply, as naturally, as two blossoms that blow together in the summer breeze, as two children that run to meet and play. But already the shadow of the thing she knew, and would not reveal, went before her, and would stand like a ghost from the grave between his life and her own.

The heat was very great; it was a heat as if the fires, burning in the woods and on the mountains, had coursed down in streams of flame and licked up all the beauty of the earth as prairie-fires do.