well as his
sister. In the most sceptical heart there lurks at such moments, when
the chances of existence are involved, a desire to leave a correct
impression of the feelings, like a light by which the action may be seen
when personality is gone, gone where no light of investigation can ever
reach the truth which every death takes out of the world. Therefore,
instead of looking for something to eat, or trying to snatch an hour or
so of sleep, Decoud was filling the pages of a large pocket-book with a
letter to his sister.

In the intimacy of that intercourse he could not keep out his weariness,
his great fatigue, the close touch of his bodily sensations. He began
again as if he were talking to her. With almost an illusion of her
presence, he wrote the phrase, "I am very hungry."

"I have the feeling of a great solitude around me," he continued. "Is
it, perhaps, because I am the only man with a definite idea in his head,
in the complete collapse of every resolve, intention, and hope about me?
But the solitude is also very real. All the engineers are out, and have
been for two days, looking after the property of the National Central
Railway, of that great Costaguana undertaking which is to put money into
the pockets of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Americans, Germans, and God knows
who else. The silence about me is ominous. There is above the middle
part of this house a sort of first floor, with narrow openings like
loopholes for windows, probably used in old times for the better
defence against the savages, when the persistent barbarism of our native
continent did not wear the black coats of politicians, but went about
yelling, half-naked, with bows and arrows in its hands. The woman of
the house is dying up there, I believe, all alone with her old husband.
There is a narrow staircase, the sort of staircase one man could easily
defend against a mob, leading up there, and I have just heard, through
the thickness of the wall, the old fellow going down into their kitchen
for something or other. It was a sort of noise a mouse might make behind
the plaster of a wall. All the servants they had ran away yesterday and
have not returned yet, if ever they do. For the rest, there are only two
children here, two girls. The father has sent them downstairs, and
they have crept into this cafe, perhaps because I am here. They huddle
together in a corner, in each other's arms; I just noticed them a few
minutes ago, and I feel more lonely tha