'I have remembered, dear,' she said softly, and knelt on the ground
and joined her hands in prayer. Then the weakness of her body overcame
the strength of her spirit; she leaned forward lower and lower until
her face was bowed over the yellow grass. 'I came to lie with you,'
she said under her breath; and then her lips parted more widely with a
choking sigh, the blood gushed from her mouth, and in a few minutes she
was dead.
They laid her there in the clay and the sand and the tussocks of grass,
and her father went back alone to his native place and empty room.
* * * * *
One day on the river-bank a man said to him:
'It is odd, but that lemon-tree which you sold to my master never did
well; it died within the week--a fine, strong, fresh young tree. Were
there worms at its root, think you, or did the change to the open air
kill it?'
Fringuello, who had always had a scared, wild, dazed look on his face
since he returned from the sea-coast, looked at the speaker stupidly,
not with any wonder, but like one who hears what he has long known but
only imperfectly understands.
'It knew Lizina was dead,' he said simply; and then thrust his spade
into the sand and dug.
He would never smile nor sing any more, nor any more know any joys of
life; but he still worked on from that habit which is the tyrant and
saviour of the poor.
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
Transcriber's Notes:
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected, sometimes by referencing
other editions of these stories.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Rainy June and Other Stories, by Ouida
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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