lonely, silent, apathetic Indian in charge of the palmarias, who
brought sometimes a load of cocoanuts to the town for sale. He lived
without a woman in an open shed, with a perpetual fire of dry sticks
smouldering near an old canoe lying bottom up on the beach. He could be
easily avoided.

The barking of the dogs about that man's ranche was the first thing that
checked his speed. He had forgotten the dogs. He swerved sharply, and
plunged into the palm-grove, as into a wilderness of columns in an
immense hall, whose dense obscurity seemed to whisper and rustle faintly
high above his head. He traversed it, entered a ravine, and climbed to
the top of a steep ridge free of trees and bushes.

From there, open and vague in the starlight, he saw the plain between
the town and the harbour. In the woods above some night-bird made a
strange drumming noise. Below beyond the palmaria on the beach, the
Indian's dogs continued to bark uproariously. He wondered what had upset
them so much, and, peering down from his elevation, was surprised to
detect unaccountable movements of the ground below, as if several oblong
pieces of the plain had been in motion. Those dark, shifting patches,
alternately catching and eluding the eye, altered their place always
away from the harbour, with a suggestion of consecutive order and
purpose. A light dawned upon him. It was a column of infantry on a night
march towards the higher broken country at the foot of the hills. But he
was too much in the dark about everything for wonder and speculation.

The plain had resumed its shadowy immobility. He descended the ridge and
found himself in the open solitude, between the harbour and the town.
Its spaciousness, extended indefinitely by an effect of obscurity,
rendered more sensible his profound isolation. His pace became slower.
No one waited for him; no one thought of him; no one expected or wished
his return. "Betrayed! Betrayed!" he muttered to himself. No one
cared. He might have been drowned by this time. No one would have
cared--unless, perhaps, the children, he thought to himself. But they
were with the English signora, and not thinking of him at all.

He wavered in his purpose of making straight for the Casa Viola. To what
end? What could he expect there? His life seemed to fail him in all
its details, even to the scornful reproaches of Teresa. He was
aware painfully of his reluctance. Was it that remorse which she had
prophesied with, what he sa