Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/182

 He was so happy; he could not stay to look behind. He longed for the voices of the world, for the hum and the laughter of the streets, for the sound and the sense of living, for the dark old houses leaning above the silvery shallows of Mantuan waters, while the lute throbbed below and the human heart beat above!

Away there, north and south, and east and west, the earth was alive with the mirth and the music and the triumphs and the passions of men.

He forgot that there were pain and privation and struggle and sorrow there also; he only remembered the world as an orchard of fruit and of flowers, fair to behold and to taste, full of sunshine eternal, and musical with tireless song. That Winter came there, and sickness, and grief, and death, he had forgotten.

The boat was on the edge of the sea, tied by a rope to a pine-tree, and with the oars of it lying on the beach.

'I will come back to her,' he thought, and he pushed the little skiff through the loose yellow sand to the surf.

For a moment it ploughed the soil, sullenly grating on the pebbles as it went; in