Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/305

 flower and cyclamen, and shaded with heavy boughs of beech and chestnut.

Even in the strained, vague terror which filled her mind to the exclusion of any other emotion, a sense of the beauty of this morning smote her, and her eyes involuntarily dwelt upon the scene around her.

Before her, some sixteen miles away, there was a dome that lifted itself from the circling mists and the green shadows of a great plain; a dome that looked blue as a hyacinth, ethereal as a shadow itself, against the clearness of the morning skies. The plain was the Roman Campagna, and the dome was the dome of San Pietro.

She did not know it, but dimly she divined it. Something of that ineffable thrill which comes to all who thus behold it moved her even in her ignorance.

'Yonder must be Rome,' she thought, and knelt a moment on the grass, forgetting Saturnino.

The moment passed, she sprang to her feet again, remembering her errand; alert, lithe, agile, wary even in her fatigue as any forest animal that watches for the hunters to spring away at the first sound it hears.

Saturnino went down the cliffs, and