sion.
His forces suddenly abandoned him, and he fell upon the brink of a
ditch, exhausted. But his heart was beating with content. The heaven,
thickly sown with the most brilliant stars, had never seemed so
beautiful to him. He contemplated it, as he lay stretched out on the
grass to sleep, and thought that, perhaps, at that very moment, his
mother was gazing at him. And he said:--

"O my mother, where art thou? What art thou doing at this moment? Dost
thou think of thy son? Dost thou think of thy Marco, who is so near to
thee?"

Poor Marco! If he could have seen in what a case his mother was at that
moment, he would have made a superhuman effort to proceed on his way,
and to reach her a few hours earlier. She was ill in bed, in a
ground-floor room of a lordly mansion, where dwelt the entire Mequinez
family. The latter had become very fond of her, and had helped her a
great deal. The poor woman had already been ailing when the engineer
Mequinez had been obliged unexpectedly to set out far from Buenos Ayres,
and she had not benefited at all by the fine air of Cordova. But then,
the fact that she had received no response to her letters from her
husband, nor from her cousin, the presentiment, always lively, of some
great misfortune, the continual anxiety in which she had lived, between
the parting and staying, expecting every day some bad news, had caused
her to grow worse out of all proportion. Finally, a very serious malady
had declared itself,--a strangled internal rupture. She had not risen
from her bed for a fortnight. A surgical operation was necessary to save
her life. And at precisely the moment when Marco was apostrophizing her,
the master and mistress of the house were standing beside her bed,
arguing with her, with great gentleness, to persuade her to allow
herself to be operated on, and she was persisting in her refusal, and
weeping. A good physician of Tucuman had come in vain a week before.

"No, my dear master," she said; "do not count upon it; I have not the
strength to resist; I should die under the surgeon's knife. It is better
to allow me to die thus. I no longer cling to life. All is at an end for
me. It is better to die before learning what has happened to my family."

And her master and mistress opposed, and said that she must take
courage, that she would receive a reply to the last letters, which had
been sent directly to Genoa; that she must allow the operation to be
performed; that it must be d