It was a gift as poisoned, a granted prayer as vain, as the immortality which they had given to Tithonus.
"A little gold," he had said: it seemed a thing almost within her grasp.
Had she been again willing to steal from Flamma, she could have taken it as soon as the worth of the load she carried should have been paid to her; but by a theft she would not serve Arslàn now. No gifts would she give him but what should be pure and worthy of his touch. She pondered and pondered, cleaving the waters with dull regular measure, and gliding under the old stone arches of the bridge into the town.
When she brought the boat back up the stream at noonday, her face had cleared; her mouth smiled; she rowed on swiftly, with a light sweet and glad in her eyes.
A thought had come to her.
In the market-place that day she had heard two women talk together, under the shade of their great red umbrellas, over their heaps of garden produce.
"So thou hast bought the brindled calf after all! Thou art in luck."
"Ay, in luck indeed, for the boy to rout up the old pear-tree and find those queer coins beneath it. The tree had stood there all my father's and grandfather's time, and longer too, for aught I know, and no one ever dreamed there was any treasure at the root; but he took a fancy to dig up the tree; he said it looked like a ghost, with its old gray arms, and he wanted to plant a young cherry."
"There must have been a mass of coin?"
"No,—only a few little shabby, bent pieces. But the lad took them up to the Prince Sartorian; and he is always crazed about the like; and he sent us for them quite a roll of gold, and said that the coins found were, beyond a doubt, of the Julian time—whatever he might mean by that."