Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/44

 Silence and constraint, too, parted him and Musa. Anger on his side and fear on hers made a wall between them.

The words that had been said could not be unsaid. The magic syllable had been spoken which broke up for evermore their simple and innocent good-fellowship.

He had learned that other men found her fair; she had learned that he also could thus regard her. He was angered at what seemed to him her coldness and her obstinacy; she was troubled at his persistence and his irritation. The frank, familiar intercourse of the past was over for ever; constraint and irritability came into their communion; silence and timidity grew up like a barrier between them, builded by invisible hands.

A kind of reverence came to him for this daring and sinless nature, which was so unlike his own; vaguely he feared her as in another way she feared him. Sometimes, when he watched her from the entrance-way come across the moors, with the sunbeams about her head and the shadows about her feet, old classic fancies came to him as they had come to Sanctis, and she seemed to him like a young Immortal for