Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/209

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

NAUSICAA, in the safe shelter of her father's halls, had never tended Odysseus with more serenity and purity than the daughter of Saturnino tended his fellow-slave.

The sanctity of the tombs lay on them, the dead were so near; neither profanity or passion seemed to have any place here in this mysterious twilight alive with the memories of a vanished people. Her innocence was a grand and noble thing, like any one of the large white lilies that rose up from the noxious mud of the marshes: a cup of ivory wet with the dewdrops of dawn, blossoming fair on fetid waters. And in him the languor of sickness and of despair