rward like a sinking lighter. "Ola! viejo!" he repeated, falteringly,
swaying where he stood. His hand, extended to steady himself, fell
upon the table. Moving a step forward, he shifted it, and felt a box
of matches under his fingers. He fancied he had heard a quiet sigh. He
listened for a moment, holding his breath; then, with trembling hands,
tried to strike a light.

The tiny piece of wood flamed up quite blindingly at the end of his
fingers, raised above his blinking eyes. A concentrated glare fell
upon the leonine white head of old Giorgio against the black
fire-place--showed him leaning forward in a chair in staring immobility,
surrounded, overhung, by great masses of shadow, his legs crossed, his
cheek in his hand, an empty pipe in the corner of his mouth. It seemed
hours before he attempted to turn his face; at the very moment the match
went out, and he disappeared, overwhelmed by the shadows, as if the
walls and roof of the desolate house had collapsed upon his white head
in ghostly silence.

Nostromo heard him stir and utter dispassionately the words--

"It may have been a vision."

"No," he said, softly. "It is no vision, old man."

A strong chest voice asked in the dark--

"Is that you I hear, Giovann' Battista?"

"Si, viejo. Steady. Not so loud."

After his release by Sotillo, Giorgio Viola, attended to the very door
by the good-natured engineer-in-chief, had reentered his house, which
he had been made to leave almost at the very moment of his wife's death.
All was still. The lamp above was burning. He nearly called out to her
by name; and the thought that no call from him would ever again evoke
the answer of her voice, made him drop heavily into the chair with
a loud groan, wrung out by the pain as of a keen blade piercing his
breast.

The rest of the night he made no sound. The darkness turned to grey, and
on the colourless, clear, glassy dawn the jagged sierra stood out flat
and opaque, as if cut out of paper.

The enthusiastic and severe soul of Giorgio Viola, sailor, champion of
oppressed humanity, enemy of kings, and, by the grace of Mrs. Gould,
hotel-keeper of the Sulaco harbour, had descended into the open abyss of
desolation amongst the shattered vestiges of his past. He remembered
his wooing between two campaigns, a single short week in the season of
gathering olives. Nothing approached the grave passion of that time but
the deep, passionate sense of his bereavement. He discovered all