Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/275

 A whole year and more had passed by, and she had heard nothing of him, he had given no sign that he remembered her.

True, where he was, amidst his new pleasures and his new riches, her memory passed over him again and again, a score of times each day, with a sharp reproach in it, and he said always to himself, 'tomorrow I will go; next week I will go,' and let the days and the weeks slip away into the abyss of the past.

But she could not tell that. She could only know that he had forgotten. She tried to believe it was but natural and no cruelty. She was young, and she still clung to hope. To-morrow he would come.

One day in early November weather—the grand, buoyant, sunlit weather that comes in this season in these lands, with wondrous pomp of sunsets and lovely noontides warm as midsummer, and a delicious stir and freshness in all the sweet-smelling air—she was sitting at the entrance of the sepulchre, when a figure did appear in the transparent light of early day, and came onward across the grasslands, and she rose and regarded him with dilated eyes, knowing him even though he wore the garb of a Campagna shepherd.