Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/196

 drenched her with rains till she was scarcely higher as an animal than her own mother-sheep, who wanted nothing but to nibble and browse and hear their lambs bleat and lie safe at night.

She was stupid as a stone; but she was not unkind nor unfaithful. She kept the secret of the tombs even from her own man, and took a dull liking to this beautiful woodland solitary so unlike herself, who gave her food and helped her to beat her rags in the water, and who looked to her so grand, so fearless, so young, so fair, and yet had the burden of women on her, and was all alone.

'Never saw I anything like her on these pastures or above on our own hills,' she thought often, and had a dim superstitious fear of her, and obeyed her without hesitation, and deemed herself paid abundantly by a basket full of fungi or of arbutus-fruit for her children, who were growing up as the lambs and the kids do, tumbling with them on the pastures.

Hers had been but a sorry life; all winter passed on the lonely moist meadows of Maremma, all summer spent in hard work upon the corn lands on the mountain sides