Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/237

 so that there she would remain until they opened again, and might die of the malaria of the town for aught that any one knew or cared. An accused is always two-thirds of a criminal in the eyes of the law, which always looks through magnifying glasses.

The steward went his way, the judge and the lawyers went theirs. No one cared whether she lived or died, and the hot winds came and blew the stagno into pestilential vapours, and the white piles of the salt glared in the sun, and the heavy livid heat settled down on all the shore, and disease walked abroad with every fall of evening dew.

They shut her in her cell, and the sole solace she had was that she was left alone in it. But it went hard with her to keep her reason; not to let go her hold on life and sense. She to whom it had been torture only to see the birds imprisoned in the nets, to whom the open air had been as breath from the very lips of a merciful God, to whom the lowliest weed had had beauty and the lowliest beast been a comrade, who had never missed the setting of the sun and the rising of it, who had watched the passage of the round moon through the illu-