of Cavour--the arch intriguer sold to kings and
tyrants--could be heard involved in imprecations against the China
girls, cooking in general, and the brute of a country where he was
reduced to live for the love of liberty that traitor had strangled.

Then Signora Teresa, all in black, issuing from another door, advanced,
portly and anxious, inclining her fine, black-browed head, opening her
arms, and crying in a profound tone--

"Giorgio! thou passionate man! Misericordia Divina! In the sun like
this! He will make himself ill."

At her feet the hens made off in all directions, with immense strides;
if there were any engineers from up the line staying in Sulaco, a young
English face or two would appear at the billiard-room occupying one end
of the house; but at the other end, in the cafe, Luis, the mulatto, took
good care not to show himself. The Indian girls, with hair like flowing
black manes, and dressed only in a shift and short petticoat, stared
dully from under the square-cut fringes on their foreheads; the noisy
frizzling of fat had stopped, the fumes floated upwards in sunshine,
a strong smell of burnt onions hung in the drowsy heat, enveloping the
house; and the eye lost itself in a vast flat expanse of grass to the
west, as if the plain between the Sierra overtopping Sulaco and the
coast range away there towards Esmeralda had been as big as half the
world.

Signora Teresa, after an impressive pause, remonstrated--

"Eh, Giorgio! Leave Cavour alone and take care of yourself now we are
lost in this country all alone with the two children, because you cannot
live under a king."

And while she looked at him she would sometimes put her hand hastily
to her side with a short twitch of her fine lips and a knitting of
her black, straight eyebrows like a flicker of angry pain or an angry
thought on her handsome, regular features.

It was pain; she suppressed the twinge. It had come to her first a few
years after they had left Italy to emigrate to America and settle at
last in Sulaco after wandering from town to town, trying shopkeeping
in a small way here and there; and once an organized enterprise of
fishing--in Maldonado--for Giorgio, like the great Garibaldi, had been a
sailor in his time.

Sometimes she had no patience with pain. For years its gnawing had been
part of the landscape embracing the glitter of the harbour under
the wooded spurs of the range; and the sunshine itself was heavy and
dull--heavy wit