Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/186

 earth, though it trembles and changes as the earthquake destroys or the flood effaces it.

Thought seemed dead in her, dead with all other forms of life.

He was gone, he was hers no more; this was all that she knew.

To her as to him who mourned for Daphnis in the Sicilian vales, it seemed as though the very flowers of earth must lament his loss, and the very stone of the rock sigh because it no more could echo to his voice. To her all creation seemed stricken, deserted, mute.

Her happiness was dead, and all living things seemed to her to die with it.

The terrible days, the yet more terrible nights, dragged on; the vacant hours with no pulse of gladness beating in them passed away in slow procession. No more did she rise and greet the sun with smiling eyes; no more did the twilight seem a messenger of heaven; no more was every breath a sigh of deep content.

No more: no more.

The silence that follows on separation has a likeness so frightful to the eternal separation of death that it brings with it the same unspeakable terror, the same sense of