Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/366

 "If he die it is I who will have killed him," she said in her own heart night and day.

Once she found herself in her long lonely rides near Palestrina, and met the old steward, and recognised him, and went into the sad, silent, deserted house; and listened to the old man's stories of his beloved lord's boyhood and manhood, and of the people's clinging feudal attachment to him, and of his devotion to them in the time of the cholera pestilence.

"There is not an old charcoal burner or a little goatherd on the estates that would not give his life for Prince Paolo," the steward said to her, crying like a child because there was no news from Sicily.

The same evening she went to a great Pasqua ball at the Trasimene villa. As they fastened the diamonds over her hair and in her bosom she felt to hate the shining, senseless, soulless stones;—they were the emblem of the things for which she had lost him; and at that very hour, for ought they knew, he might be lying dead on some solitary shore by the fair blue sea of Theocritus!