Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/302

 creature anywhere upon them save the meek and melancholy buffalo, and the wild mares and colts that here and there swept like a hurrying wind over the brown grasslands.

Rome, too, said nothing to her.

The name that alike the poet and the scholar, the devotee and the agnostic, can never hear without emotion, to her had no meaning save as a place where her lover dwelt. In her childhood she had heard speak of Rome as of the city of the Holy Father, and had had vague fancies of it as of a great white throne set upon the everlasting hills, with walls of ivory and gates of gold, and all the angels as its ministers, and on it for ever a light like that of sunrise.

That had been her vision of it as a child.

Now she knew it was what men called a city: a place terrible to her as of meeting roofs and brawling crowds; a place where he lived, and living, forgot Maremma.

'Is it far, so very far, to Rome?' she wondered, with a sinking heart and tired feet.

Saturnino had still chosen the inland instead of the seaward way; he still feared those watch-towers of the coast, the soldiery who were perpetually on vigil to seize the smugglers from the isles.