Page:Hornung - Irralies Bushranger.djvu/57

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NIGHT AND DAY
45

again—with its suspicions, doubts, arguments, lapses of involuntary introspection, and agonies of acute self-contempt. Only now she could wander and rend her spirit in the open air; she was no longer imprisoned in the dark between burning sheets. The scent of the pines was in her nostrils, the shadows of the pines striped and fluted the whiteness of her cool attire; and to look at her, with bent head and red sunshade and raven hair, her maiden meditations, if not fancy-free, might have been guaranteed free as a child's from grave concern. Yet there was mischief in her feet as in her mind. It led her to the broken column and the lonely grave; and there it held her, still with thought, and gazing at the inscription with eyes that read not; nor ever moving till a breaking twig broke also the spell that bound the girl.