Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/39

 the walls of the thick-growing bay enclosed her, and the turtle-dove, and the partridge and the friendly blackbird flitted by her as she prayed to heaven in her vague trustfulness which was rather hope than faith.

'Keep him safely!' was the perpetual burden of her prayer.

'Yet what is the use?' she would think wistfully as she rose from her knees and heard some distant report of a gun breaking the frosted stillness of the early morning. 'God cannot care; He lets the birds be netted and the little gentle hare be torn with shot. They are His creatures as much as we, and He gives them over to make the wicked sport of men.'

No one cared; the terrible, barren, acrid truth, that science trumpets abroad as though it were some new-found joy, touched her ignorance with its desolating despair. No one cared. Life was only sustained by death. The harmless and lovely children of the air and of the moor were given over, year after year, century after century, to the bestial play and the ferocious appetites of men. The wondrous beauty of the earth renewed itself only to be the scene of endless suffering, of interminable torture.