moved away, followed by Placido, who was beginning to ask himself
if he were not dreaming.

"Does it surprise you," Simoun asked him, "to see a Spaniard so young
and so afflicted with disease? Two years ago he was as robust as you
are, but his enemies succeeded in sending him to Balabak to work in a
penal settlement, and there he caught the rheumatism and fever that
are dragging him into the grave. The poor devil had married a very
beautiful woman."

As an empty carriage was passing, Simoun hailed it and with Placido
directed it to his house in the Escolta, just at the moment when the
clocks were striking half-past ten.

Two hours later Placido left the jeweler's house and walked gravely
and thoughtfully along the Escolta, then almost deserted, in spite
of the fact that the cafes were still quite animated. Now and then
a carriage passed rapidly, clattering noisily over the worn pavement.

From a room in his house that overlooked the Pasig, Simoun turned
his gaze toward the Walled City, which could be seen through the open
windows, with its roofs of galvanized iron gleaming in the moonlight
and its somber towers showing dull and gloomy in the midst of the
serene night. He laid aside his blue goggles, and his white hair,
like a frame of silver, surrounded his energetic bronzed features,
dimly lighted by a lamp whose flame was dying out from lack of
oil. Apparently wrapped in thought, he took no notice of the fading
light and impending darkness.

"Within a few days," he murmured, "when on all sides that accursed city
is burning, den of presumptuous nothingness and impious exploitation
of the ignorant and the distressed, when the tumults break out in the
suburbs and there rush into the terrorized streets my avenging hordes,
engendered by rapacity and wrongs, then will I burst the walls of
your prison, I will tear you from the clutches of fanaticism, and my
white dove, you will be the Phoenix that will rise from the glowing
embers! A revolution plotted by men in darkness tore me from your
side--another revolution will sweep me into your arms and revive
me! That moon, before reaching the apogee of its brilliance, will
light the Philippines cleansed of loathsome filth!"

Simoun, stopped suddenly, as though interrupted. A voice in his inner
consciousness was asking if he, Simoun, were not also a part of the
filth of that accursed city, perhaps its most poisonous ferment. Like
the dead who are to rise at the sound of the