Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/197

 and the olive and the chestnut forests up above, where the snow lay on the highest rocks in June. It had made her dull, indifferent, always tired; but being an open-air creature she was faithful.

She stayed beside Musa in the beaming days of earliest spring, when the daffodils' trumpets of gold were blowing in all the grass, and the poet's narcissus was shining in every shady place, and the eyes that loved them could not rejoice in them, but were closed on the blindness and languor of pain.

The child of Este was born with the daffodils; but he only breathed a few short days after his birth, and died, softly and painlessly, as the daffodils did when they had bloomed their little hour.

The woman of the Apennines was frightened, because for many hours she could not take his small dead body from Musa's hold; when at last his mother could be made to understand that dead indeed he was, despair seized on her, long convulsions succeeded to her passionate weeping.

If he had lived—if his little feet had run over the grasses to her, if she had heard his first laugh at the first flower; if she had seen Este's eyes smile again in his, and heard