he repeated in a faint voice, as if from the depths of a
dream. "What is it you say?"

She disengaged herself gently. He got up and looked down at her, aware
of her face, of her hair, her lips, the dimples on her cheeks--seeing
the fascination of her person in the night of the gulf as if in the
blaze of noonday. Her nonchalant and seductive voice trembled with the
excitement of admiring awe and ungovernable curiosity.

"A treasure of silver!" she stammered out. Then pressed on faster:
"What? Where? How did you get it, Giovanni?"

He wrestled with the spell of captivity. It was as if striking a heroic
blow that he burst out--

"Like a thief!"

The densest blackness of the Placid Gulf seemed to fall upon his head.
He could not see her now. She had vanished into a long, obscure abysmal
silence, whence her voice came back to him after a time with a faint
glimmer, which was her face.

"I love you! I love you!"

These words gave him an unwonted sense of freedom; they cast a spell
stronger than the accursed spell of the treasure; they changed his weary
subjection to that dead thing into an exulting conviction of his power.
He would cherish her, he said, in a splendour as great as Dona Emilia's.
The rich lived on wealth stolen from the people, but he had taken from
the rich nothing--nothing that was not lost to them already by their
folly and their betrayal. For he had been betrayed--he said--deceived,
tempted. She believed him. . . . He had kept the treasure for purposes
of revenge; but now he cared nothing for it. He cared only for her. He
would put her beauty in a palace on a hill crowned with olive trees--a
white palace above a blue sea. He would keep her there like a jewel in
a casket. He would get land for her--her own land fertile with vines and
corn--to set her little feet upon. He kissed them. . . . He had already
paid for it all with the soul of a woman and the life of a man. . . .
The Capataz de Cargadores tasted the supreme intoxication of his
generosity. He flung the mastered treasure superbly at her feet in
the impenetrable darkness of the gulf, in the darkness defying--as men
said--the knowledge of God and the wit of the devil. But she must let
him grow rich first--he warned her.

She listened as if in a trance. Her fingers stirred in his hair. He got
up from his knees reeling, weak, empty, as though he had flung his soul
away.

"Make haste, then," she said. "Make haste, Giovanni, my lover, my
master,