Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/66

 she could not lead him from the gloom up into the light, she could not make him rejoice in the green world that was renewing its youth.

An impulse of longing to look on him once more made her retrace her steps, and made her kneel, leaning down to look through that cleft in the rock roof of the tomb which she had made in the earliest days of her occupation of the tombs, that by its orifice the smoke of her wood fire might escape.

Through the fissure she saw straight down into the chamber where she had first found the golden warrior on his bier. She saw Este as he sat in the stone chair once sculptured there for visitants to the dead. His body was bent, his arms lay outstretched on the table of nenfro that held his modelling tools, his head was bowed down on them; his whole attitude expressed the unnerved, weary, hopeless dejection of a man to whom life was valueless.

The sight of him thus smote her as if with a blow. He called her cruel: was she in truth cruel? Was she cruel as one who denies water to a chained dog, air to a