Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/229

 they should blame her for having buried her little child and brought the body of Joconda there. She had done no harm; she could not see why they should seek to punish her. But the spirit with which a few months earlier she would have laughed them to scorn and cut her way free of them, if needs be with her knife, was gone out of her. Her lover was lost to her, and her child was dead: little else mattered.

She was kept in that prison a month, awaiting such time as they should see fit to remove and to try her for this crime. The air grew very hot; the town was like a sick ward in a hospital, the miasma crept up at sunset every night from the swamps around, and found out the people sitting on the sea-walls, or in the streets at dominoes, or lying panting and naked on their beds.

She was shut in her little cell; she who had all the day long roamed moor and shore, and plunged in the waves, and led the life of a woodland beast or of a silver-plumaged guillemot.

The cell had a square window, with four transverse iron bars; it was very narrow, but through it she could see the sea, the only familiar friend she had. She thought