Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/195

 knowing that the season would soon come when she could work no more.

Some instinct led her to make friends with a woman at this time, the only woman she had ever been near since Joconda died; a hard-featured, sunburnt, toil-bent creature prematurely old from a hard toil, who every year came down with her husband and children, and flocks of sheep and goats, all the way by the roads on foot, from the chestnut woods above San Marcello to the green pastures of Maremma. There are many do the same; it is a laborious life, always beaten about by wind and weather, but the hill-shepherds and herdsmen and their families are used to it, and cling to it as gipsies do. In summer they are up in their own northern hills from hazel-time until the chestnuts drop, and that return consoles them and sustains them.

This woman she saw once, washing linen by beating it with stones in a little stream; Musa gave her some bread she carried and spoke to her; the shepherd and the ewes and rams were further off upon the moors. The woman was not curious or intrusive; the hard life she had led had blown and scorched and chilled and