Linda said, "Ramirez is boasting in town that he will carry you off from
the island."

"What folly!" answered the other, and in a perversity born of long
restraint, she added: "He is not the man," in a jesting tone with a
trembling audacity.

"No?" said Linda, through her clenched teeth. "Is he not? Well, then,
look to it; because father has been walking about with a loaded gun at
night."

"It is not good for him. You must tell him not to, Linda. He will not
listen to me."

"I shall say nothing--never any more--to anybody," cried Linda,
passionately.

This could not last, thought Giselle. Giovanni must take her away
soon--the very next time he came. She would not suffer these terrors for
ever so much silver. To speak with her sister made her ill. But she was
not uneasy at her father's watchfulness. She had begged Nostromo not
to come to the window that night. He had promised to keep away for this
once. And she did not know, could not guess or imagine, that he had
another reason for coming on the island.

Linda had gone straight to the tower. It was time to light up. She
unlocked the little door, and went heavily up the spiral staircase,
carrying her love for the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores like an
ever-increasing load of shameful fetters. No; she could not throw it
off. No; let Heaven dispose of these two. And moving about the lantern,
filled with twilight and the sheen of the moon, with careful movements
she lighted the lamp. Then her arms fell along her body.

"And with our mother looking on," she murmured. "My own sister--the
Chica!"

The whole refracting apparatus, with its brass fittings and rings of
prisms, glittered and sparkled like a domeshaped shrine of diamonds,
containing not a lamp, but some sacred flame, dominating the sea. And
Linda, the keeper, in black, with a pale face, drooped low in a wooden
chair, alone with her jealousy, far above the shames and passions of the
earth. A strange, dragging pain as if somebody were pulling her about
brutally by her dark hair with bronze glints, made her put her hands up
to her temples. They would meet. They would meet. And she knew where,
too. At the window. The sweat of torture fell in drops on her cheeks,
while the moonlight in the offing closed as if with a colossal bar of
silver the entrance of the Placid Gulf--the sombre cavern of clouds and
stillness in the surf-fretted seaboard.

Linda Viola stood up suddenly with a finger on her lip. He lov