about it, dragged it up on to the wall beside her, which was of breadth enough to afford safe footing, and thence by degrees lowered it into the old wooden craft, half boat, half tub, belonging to Andreino in which she had spent her happiest hours.
She descended into the punt, laid the coffin reverently at her feet, loosened the chain from the staple, and, taking up her oars, bent over them and began to row back to the place on the sea-shore where she had rescued the galley-slave Mastarna.
She was drenched with the sweat of exertion, she was cold with a nameless terror, she was aching in every muscle with the strain of her over-wrought labour. But she was content. She had done her duty as she saw it. When her eyes rested on the deal surface of the oblong thing at her feet, she thought tenderly,
'Surely she knows; surely she is glad I take her to them?"
It had seemed to her so brutal, so vile, so thankless to thrust the dead, only because it was dead, into the earth, in a waste hole of ground, and leave it alone to the growth of the rank grass and the thistle, to the companionship of the newt and the worm.
