Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/364

Rh drew with most exquisite precision bands of Greek youths and maidens in the linked mazes of the dance, but none went to admire his efforts and execution. No fashionable news- papers announced the Lady Hilda's arrival in either city; she stayed on and on in Floralia.

"When I know that he is safe out of Sicily I will go," she said to herself; and let the piles of letters and invitation cards lie and accumulate as they would.

She ceased to paint, and left the St. Ursula unfinished; he had sketched it out for her on the panel, and had first tinted it en grisaille. She had not the courage to go on with it; she changed her mode of life, and rode or drove all the day long in the sweet fresh spring weather. When she was not in the open air she felt suffocated. The danger which he ran was no mere exaggeration of her cousin's malicious inventiveness, but was a fact, true and ghastly enough; no one heard of or from him, but his friends said that it was the most fatal madness that had led him to risk his life in the fastnesses of the Sicilian thieves.

"It is sheer suicide," they said around her.