Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/185

 the air, and sat half the hot hours through under the tall tree-heaths in the sand; looking, looking, looking across those sunburnt levels over which he had passed away to the unknown world. For all that seemed left to her of him, it might have been but a dream that ever she had found him there, seated beside the embers of her fire on that August eve.

She was not surprised that he had gone. She had never thought that he would stay, once knowing.

He had gone; she did not reproach him; she did not even wonder. She would have wondered if he had stayed.

She had known very well that when she had told him he was free she had drawn the knife across the throat of her living joy and killed it for ever.

She did not reason on it, or protest against her doom; it seemed to her inevitable, as that when the sun rose darkness fled. The instinctive fatalism, the strange passivity, that are in the southern temper, and succeed its gusts of passion, its heat of rage or love, made her accept her abandonment as a thing not to be questioned; to be borne as any visitation of nature is borne by the