e tumultuous heaving of his breast. Before
leaving the harbour he had thrown off the store clothing of Captain
Fidanza, for greater ease in the long pull out to the islands. He stood
before her in the red sash and check shirt as he used to appear on the
Company's wharf--a Mediterranean sailor come ashore to try his luck in
Costaguana. The dusk of purple and red enveloped him, too--close, soft,
profound, as no more than fifty yards from that spot it had gathered
evening after evening about the self-destructive passion of Don Martin
Decoud's utter scepticism, flaming up to death in solitude.

"You have got to hear," he began at last, with perfect self-control. "I
shall say no word of love to your sister, to whom I am betrothed from
this evening, because it is you that I love. It is you!" . . .

The dusk let him see yet the tender and voluptuous smile that came
instinctively upon her lips shaped for love and kisses, freeze hard in
the drawn, haggard lines of terror. He could not restrain himself any
longer. While she shrank from his approach, her arms went out to him,
abandoned and regal in the dignity of her languid surrender. He held her
head in his two hands, and showered rapid kisses upon the upturned face
that gleamed in the purple dusk. Masterful and tender, he was entering
slowly upon the fulness of his possession. And he perceived that she was
crying. Then the incomparable Capataz, the man of careless loves, became
gentle and caressing, like a woman to the grief of a child. He murmured
to her fondly. He sat down by her and nursed her fair head on his
breast. He called her his star and his little flower.

It had grown dark. From the living-room of the light-keeper's cottage,
where Giorgio, one of the Immortal Thousand, was bending his leonine and
heroic head over a charcoal fire, there came the sound of sizzling and
the aroma of an artistic frittura.

In the obscure disarray of that thing, happening like a cataclysm, it
was in her feminine head that some gleam of reason survived. He was lost
to the world in their embraced stillness. But she said, whispering into
his ear--

"God of mercy! What will become of me--here--now--between this sky and
this water I hate? Linda, Linda--I see her!" . . . She tried to get out
of his arms, suddenly relaxed at the sound of that name. But there was
no one approaching their black shapes, enlaced and struggling on the
white background of the wall. "Linda! Poor Linda! I tremble! I