off a man of flesh and blood like yourselves on a fool's business that
could not end well."

"You forget, Capataz, I was not on the wharf. And I did not think well
of the business. So you need not taunt me. I tell you what, man, we had
but little leisure to think of the dead. Death stands near behind us
all. You were gone."

"I went, indeed!" broke in Nostromo. "And for the sake of what--tell
me?"

"Ah! that is your own affair," the doctor said, roughly. "Do not ask
me."

Their flowing murmurs paused in the dark. Perched on the edge of the
table with slightly averted faces, they felt their shoulders touch, and
their eyes remained directed towards an upright shape nearly lost in the
obscurity of the inner part of the room, that with projecting head and
shoulders, in ghastly immobility, seemed intent on catching every word.

"Muy bien!" Nostromo muttered at last. "So be it. Teresa was right. It
is my own affair."

"Teresa is dead," remarked the doctor, absently, while his mind
followed a new line of thought suggested by what might have been called
Nostromo's return to life. "She died, the poor woman."

"Without a priest?" the Capataz asked, anxiously.

"What a question! Who could have got a priest for her last night?"

"May God keep her soul!" ejaculated Nostromo, with a gloomy and hopeless
fervour which had no time to surprise Dr. Monygham, before, reverting to
their previous conversation, he continued in a sinister tone, "Si,
senor doctor. As you were saying, it is my own affair. A very desperate
affair."

"There are no two men in this part of the world that could have saved
themselves by swimming as you have done," the doctor said, admiringly.

And again there was silence between those two men. They were both
reflecting, and the diversity of their natures made their thoughts born
from their meeting swing afar from each other. The doctor, impelled to
risky action by his loyalty to the Goulds, wondered with thankfulness at
the chain of accident which had brought that man back where he would be
of the greatest use in the work of saving the San Tome mine. The doctor
was loyal to the mine. It presented itself to his fifty-years' old eyes
in the shape of a little woman in a soft dress with a long train, with
a head attractively overweighted by a great mass of fair hair and the
delicate preciousness of her inner worth, partaking of a gem and
a flower, revealed in every attitude of her person. As the dangers
thic