Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/45

 whom all mortal love were too fleeting and profane.

But this mood lasted but a brief space with him; there soon rose up in him the lower impulses, the less noble instincts. She was beautiful as any forest creature, all grace and vigour and harmonious movement, could be; and she had said that she loved him, and yet he had not even touched her cheek with his!

A sombre anger brooded perpetually in him. He ceased to remember all he owed to her; he was absorbed in the sense of all that she denied him.

'I ask for bread and you give me a stone,' he said bitterly to her one day, in that tone which always hurt her, confused her, and filled her with a dumb pain like that of an animal punished cruelly for no fault of which it is conscious.

Sometimes, in her vague terror of this potent influence which stole the strength out of her nature and the peace out of her heart, she almost longed to leave him, to run away into shelter and solitude as she had fled from the hunters and the shepherds.

But it would have been a cowardice, and in her sight therefore a crime.