Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/276

 The great, gaunt, sunburnt figure was between her and the sunlight. He looked old; his hair was white, and white were his shaggy eyebrows, from under which his sombre cavernous eyes gazed out in a savage pain, like those of a great animal struck by a bullet. He wore a broad hat and clothes of goatskin, and bore in his hand the crozier-shaped crook of southern shepherds.

He paused before her, leaving some yards of earth between herself and him. He seemed afraid to approach her. She at a glance had known him again.

'You are Saturnino Mastarna,' she said, and her voice had neither pity nor scorn in it, but a weary calmness of indifference. Nothing mattered to her.

'I am Saturnino Mastarna,' he answered mechanically, whilst his eyes rested on her, and he said to himself, 'Yes, it is she; Serapia's child; my child. She has Serapia's face and mine, blended together, as when we stooped over a stream the water blent in one our two reflections; and all the life and the fire are gone out of her, and it is he who has done that.'

'You are Saturnino Mastarna,' she said