l'Administrateur. Ten millions in sight! And a railway
coming--a railway! They will never believe my report. C'est trop beau."
He fell a prey to a screaming ecstasy, in the midst of sagely nodding
heads, before Charles Gould's imperturbable calm.

And only the priest continued his pacing, flinging round the skirt of
his soutane at each end of his beat. Decoud murmured to him ironically:
"Those gentlemen talk about their gods."

Father Corbelan stopped short, looked at the journalist of Sulaco
fixedly for a moment, shrugged his shoulders slightly, and resumed his
plodding walk of an obstinate traveller.

And now the Europeans were dropping off from the group around Charles
Gould till the Administrador of the Great Silver Mine could be seen in
his whole lank length, from head to foot, left stranded by the
ebbing tide of his guests on the great square of carpet, as it were a
multi-coloured shoal of flowers and arabesques under his brown boots.
Father Corbelan approached the rocking-chair of Don Jose Avellanos.

"Come, brother," he said, with kindly brusqueness and a touch of
relieved impatience a man may feel at the end of a perfectly useless
ceremony. "A la Casa! A la Casa! This has been all talk. Let us now go
and think and pray for guidance from Heaven."

He rolled his black eyes upwards. By the side of the frail
diplomatist--the life and soul of the party--he seemed gigantic, with
a gleam of fanaticism in the glance. But the voice of the party, or,
rather, its mouthpiece, the "son Decoud" from Paris, turned journalist
for the sake of Antonia's eyes, knew very well that it was not so, that
he was only a strenuous priest with one idea, feared by the women and
execrated by the men of the people. Martin Decoud, the dilettante in
life, imagined himself to derive an artistic pleasure from watching
the picturesque extreme of wrongheadedness into which an honest,
almost sacred, conviction may drive a man. "It is like madness. It must
be--because it's self-destructive," Decoud had said to himself often.
It seemed to him that every conviction, as soon as it became effective,
turned into that form of dementia the gods send upon those they wish to
destroy. But he enjoyed the bitter flavour of that example with the zest
of a connoisseur in the art of his choice. Those two men got on well
together, as if each had felt respectively that a masterful conviction,
as well as utter scepticism, may lead a man very far on the by-paths o