Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/51

 you watch for, go. Ah! why do you speak of the impossible!'

'If you did love me indeed,' she said, wistfully and gravely, 'this place would be to you more than all the palaces of earth. If they offered me a palace such as you tell me of, I would not go to it, for we met here.'

He sighed with impatience and regret.

So once had been dear to him the grass-grown streets, the reed-filled waters, the melancholy ways, of ruined Mantua, because there at evening-time, when the white gnats came in clouds about the old bronze fanali, by the lamp-light, behind a grated casement, he had seen one woman's face.

That had been love; even though it were dead now, killed with the same daggerthrust that had killed her.

'You are free to walk abroad,' he said, with vexed impatience. 'Were you a prisoner as I have been, and as I am, you would know that one curses one's prison, and would curse it though its walls were alabaster and its bars were gold. I am not thankless to these tombs, but they are tombs; and in them I am buried, alive, as the Etruscans were