Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/373

 of despair appalled her: what would her future be? Only one long empty void, in whose hollowness the "pleasures" of the world would rattle like dead bones. She began to understand that for a great love there is no death possible. It is like Ahasuerus the Jew: it must live on in torment for ever.

And how she had smiled at all these things when others had spoken of them!

The days passed slowly one by one; the beautiful city was in its spring glory, and ran over with the blossoms of flowers, as though it were the basket that Persephone let fall. The news-sheets were full of this deed which he had done in Sicily; she bought them all, down to the tawdriest little sheet that held his name, and read the well-known story again and again a hundred and ten hundred times; his friends expected him to arrive in the town each day, but no one heard anything direct from himself.

"It is strange he writes to none of us," said Maremma; "can anything have happened?"

"Oh, no; the papers would know it," said the Duc de St. Louis.