Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/162

 in it to refresh the panting lungs of man or beast.

In the outer chamber, where the most air came, Este was lying asleep.

He was cast down for coolness on the stone bier where once she had seen the king lie in his armour of gold. He looked like a dead man. He was very pale, his chest scarcely heaved as he breathed, his lips were close shut, his long lashes rested on his wasted cheeks.

The loose shirt he wore fell off his breast and showed the emaciated bones, and the feeble yet feverish beating of his heart. In his noonday sleep he looked exhausted, hopeless, heart-broken.

Suddenly, as if it were written in letters of fire above his head, she saw the truth: that what was her home was but his prison, that what was her heaven was but at best a living death to him.

Without awaking him she went away and climbed again into the upper air; and there, where the marucca and myrtle made a shadow above the place of the tombs, she sat down on a block of palombino, stunned and dumb.

At sight of him she had known the