Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/267

 spiritual atmosphere, he recoiled more and more, day by day, from seeking her as the medium of his own fortune, he checked himself more and more in the utterance of a passion which could but seem to her mingled at the least with the lowest of motives.

He was her lover, he did not disguise it from himself or her; but he paused before doing that which would make him win or lose it all; not because he feared his fate, but because he could not bring himself to the acceptance of it.

"Sing me something yourself," she said to him; and he took the boy's mandolin and, leaning against the porch of the house, touched a chord of it now and then, and sang her every thing she would, while the sun shone in the silver of the olives and the afternoon shadows stole slowly down the side of the mountains. Then he sat down on the steps at her feet, and talked to her of his people, of his land, of his boyhood and his youth.

"I have lived very much in the great world," he said, after a time. "This world which you think is the only one. But I am never so well